Third Shift Herohttp://thirdshifthero.com
My life of tech, gaming, and too many midnightsTue, 14 Aug 2018 01:32:42 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8Building a Gaming Grouphttp://thirdshifthero.com/building-a-gaming-group/
http://thirdshifthero.com/building-a-gaming-group/#respondFri, 14 Mar 2014 16:05:47 +0000http://thirdshifthero.com/?p=230[...]]]>I have been reading (and responding) on reddit a great deal about problems within gaming groups and it really got me thinking about how people handle putting together a group. It seems like there are lots of interpersonal issues that crop up (as with any social activity) and many of them seem like completely avoidable situations. I am not trying to solve everyone’s problems here, more just musing. I have had my own troubles with my group and the groups I have been in. All the problems were solvable though, and most of the time, easily solvable. Some required tough decisions, such as kicking a couple people out in the past, or myself actually sitting out of the group because I couldn’t handle a couple people in the group at the time. These just required a few moments of sitting down and thinking though and not being afraid of making unpleasant decisions. I obviously didn’t want to sit out of a game, but I wasn’t running it and my problems would affect everyone else’s fun. It seems like sometimes a little bit of “Man the F up” is in order.

It seems that most problems could be solved before any game starts by setting expectations. When I invite someone to my group I let them know flat our what we play, how we play it and what is expected of everyone. I cover play style in general, what kinds of games we run, what is expected for attendance, and what themes we are ok and not ok with. This may sound a touch harsh, but I don’t think it would be unreasonable to for a team captain to say “Hey, you need to show up for practice unless something big comes up”. I’m not asking for a giant life commitment, but if you agree to this you need to show up regularly (pending extenuating circumstances) and mesh with our group to some degree. Don’t join our group if you are going to complain every time a sci-fi games comes up, I like sci-fi and I GM a lot of it. Now if we have the tenth sci-fi game in a row, then let your voice be heard, and stating preferences are fine as well. I just can’t stand someone absolutely refusing to play a game and thinking the group should bend to their will. A little give and take is needed all around.

I also find the anti-social nerd stereotype to be hilarious in regards to RPGs. The game in itself is a social activity and managing a group is something that requires a great deal of interpersonal communication skills to manage effectively. Maybe I just can see this because I have some training and background in management and communication. I tend to see many of those skills used in managing gaming groups. These are the same skills that are taught in management or leadership classes and even marriage counselling. Maybe I am off base with the stereotype, maybe it exists and that is why groups fall apart so much. Passive aggressive behaviour and difficulty with confrontation are some things I have seen kill groups in the past. Does it come about because people are grasping so hard to hold onto this group because it is what they know? Many times it feel more like a bad or abusive relationship and I can see how people would get caught up in the psychological trap.

That may be the reason I always see “I don’t want to leave my group” or “There is no other place for me to play” when they are having problems. Not having another group may or may not be true, I have seen both cases. However, I feel most of the time these statements are usually hyperbole or just fear of change. I have seen the fear that these people won’t be my friends any more! Well, if they are your friends I am sure you hang out other places, and let them know that. I don’t game with all my friends, and they don’t make me play softball or some other sport I hate. Communicate expectation so that people who are serious about gaming don’t get into a game that is a “hang out with my friends and drink Mountain Dew” adventure. If you are in a group that is just not working out, know when to leave. I don’t like telling people to leave their group, but if there is a big problem it may take a sit down and talking it out like it is marriage counselling. If you don’t want to do that then man up and leave. I have had to do this in the past and it sucks, but sometimes it needs to be done.

This felt like a rambled quite a bit. I know I went back and forth a few times because my mind kind of wanders like that. It may be a touch harsh in some places, but while I believe we absolutely need to be inclusive as a gaming community and understanding there comes a point where a line needs to be drawn. It may sound like another job, but I don’t want to ruin other people’s experiences with misunderstood expectations. I hope I didn’t come off as too big of a hater. I am a big advocate for getting people into gaming and am always trying to run games for completely new gamers and returning gamers. In any case, thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for reading.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/building-a-gaming-group/feed/0Getting more inspriationhttp://thirdshifthero.com/getting-more-inspriation/
http://thirdshifthero.com/getting-more-inspriation/#respondThu, 06 Mar 2014 18:09:02 +0000http://thirdshifthero.com/?p=227[...]]]>I have been brainstorming what game I plan on running next and have a lot on my mind. So many settings and stories I want to visit. I decided I want to do a heavily story based game, as opposed to my normal sandboxy, loose story game. I managed to narrow down the top three on my mind and created pitches for each one. I am solely focusing on the story of the game and I actually am still up in the air to the exact setting or system for them. I am really focusing on telling a story so I want to get opinions solely on that.

My players! Please choose 1, 2, 3, or none. Toss me and email or comment on the G+ post with your choice. I would like a quick reason why you choose the one you did and what you would like to see. If you choose none then defiantly include this. I want some feedback on these ideas so I can hopefully run a sweet game.

1. In a feudalistic world a soldier claiming to have divine favor rises up to help reclaim power for the nation. But, as their popularity grows how will the ruling powers both inside and outside the nation react? The players will be soldiers in the military of the nation and may be forced to choose sides.

2. In a world that previously knew nothing but peace, war has broken out which turns the once peaceful land into a dystopian terror for all sides. The players will be resistance fighters caught in the middle who need to choose a side or bring both down.

3. A peaceful and advanced society experiences a strange murder. It soon becomes apparent that something more sinister than a simple murder is happening. The players play law enforcement investigators that need to uncover why this murder happened and bring the criminal to justice.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/getting-more-inspriation/feed/0Dusting it off and gaming stuffhttp://thirdshifthero.com/dusting-it-off-and-gaming-stuff/
http://thirdshifthero.com/dusting-it-off-and-gaming-stuff/#respondMon, 10 Feb 2014 03:32:24 +0000http://thirdshifthero.com/?p=216[...]]]>Well it has been awhile. Pushing two years actually… The last post was my successful Linux and Citrix post I put up for my own reference and apparently others found it useful. I will probably keep that up to dateish, but it seems the same basic idea applies to each version. It is just dealing with the receiver breaking between releases.

Ran quite a few games over the two years. The last one I ran was very…. mediocre… I blame myself for not running it better. It was one of the first games I gave a title to. It was called “Legion” and was a biblical post-apocalyptic game set in Nebraska and surrounding states. It dealt with Angels and Demons and all that good stuff. Had some sweet moments, but nothing really held it solid. The plot was bumpy and the pacing was terrible.

I have yet to sit down and parse out the Ironclaw game, which is likely the best game I have ran up to this point. I hopefully write out some of the musings here just to decompile it and figure out what I did right. I attribute most of it to the players, as they did a knock out job with their characters and the interactions between them. I almost cried at one scene. It was great.

I have decided to take a break from running for a game or two (maybe the odd one shot module). That isn’t completely true. I am currently running a game for my co-workers I titles “The Destiny of Man” I think. I can’t remember. It is set in my sci-fi world and run in cortex. It kinda has a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Serenity vibe to it. Basically it steals a ton from all those settings. I ran one other game in that world, but I wanted to explore another aspect of the setting. So far it is a good time. My future plan for my main group is a Battletech game, which I have never ran before. I still am struggling with a plot for the game, so I need to really brainstorm and think something up. I did however start outlining a one-shot for the diceless game I have been writing. It is a murder mystery/investigative style game set in the Myst world in the main D’ni city. The players will be playing members of the Guild of Maintainers (the police) and investigating some happenings in the city. I am looking forward to trying it out. This is very experimental for me as I have never ran a pure investigative game or a diceless game. I probably should have just done one or the other first off. Oh well, I like to jump in with both feet.

This felt good. I think I need to just talk at the screen every now and then to release some of this stuff in my head. I hope more is to come.

I dug around for a long while trying to find a solution to this issue. I was able to find parts of it on various sites, but never found an explicit how to guide for setting this up. I’m sure most Linux pros know how to do this, but I am not that good and hopefully this will help other people use Linux for Citrix access.

Here is the environment I tested it on. I am running Kubuntu 11.10 12.04 LTS(note at bottom) , Citrix Receiver 12.1 beta for Linux. I am using a 24in NEC and 19in NEC monitor. I launch my VDI session from a web link ICA file.

If you need help setting up Citrix the instructions are located in the Citrix Ubuntu Documentation. I installed the reciever, USB support plugin, libmotif, and all that good stuff. You can find if you are missing any libraries by running the HDX script in the citric folder. for me that was “/opt/Citrix/ICAClient/util/hdxcheck.sh”, run the script as root to make sure it detects everything alright.

Now, Citrix is set up and should work fine normally, but getting it to span was giving me trouble. I saw on the Citrix and Ubuntu forums that adding the command line parameter “-span 1,2” would make it span properly. So, I just needed to get this to launch from a browser. I went into the folder Citrix was installed in again (/opt/Citrix/ICAClient) and edited the “wfica.sh” script located there. Basically this is a script that lanches the wfica program that launches Citrix. the last line of it is the command that launches the wfica program with the .ica file from the browser.

It should look like this:

$ICAROOT/wfica -file $1

I changed it to:

$ICAROOT/wfica -span 1,2 -file $1

Now it has the span parameter and will launch the file. Now I went into Firefox selected Edit -> Preferences, then to the Applications tab. Find “Citrix ICA settings file” in the list and change the program to launch it with to “wfica.sh”.

That should make Citrix launch with all the parameters we specified. You should be able to add any other command line parameters to this file if needed.

Something I like and wanted to fix(there is lots of documentation out there) is the middle click in VDI. By default it passes through a CTL+V and I wanted a standard middle click. You can do this by editing your ~/.ICAClient/wfclient.ini file and changing the MouseSendsControlV=True to False. Here is a link to the forum post I used.

NOTE: I upgraded to Kubuntu 12.10 and could not get it to work. The Citrix window would flash up quickly and then disappear and I ended up reinstalling 12.04 LTS. If I get a different result I will change the info here.

Another Note: I have Lubuntu 12.10 installed on a laptop I use and the Citrix Reciever works fine on that. I have not tested anything with dual monitors, but it looks like the Citrix stuff is working. I will try a fresh Kubuntu 12.10 install on my desktop and see if I can get Citrix working on that.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/making-citrix-span-across-multiple-monitors-in-linux/feed/9A little more app stuffhttp://thirdshifthero.com/a-little-more-app-stuff/
http://thirdshifthero.com/a-little-more-app-stuff/#respondMon, 27 Jun 2011 15:36:26 +0000http://thirdshifthero.com/?p=204[...]]]>So, I feel like I have moved into my new job alright and have a few posts planned her. We will see if anything actually comes from this.

As for the Earthdawn app I had a small hiccup with development. I was working on getting the drive I had the code and everything on backed up, but somehow I accidentally formatted over the drive. I managed to recover some stuff and at the very least my key for signing my app. It seems likely I will have to rewrite the whole thing unless I can pull the source code out of the jumbled mess of recovered files. This may be a blessing in disguise as the original write of it was a damn mess because I had no idea what I was doing at the time. I heave learned a great deal more and the app probably could do with a little cleanup. I also need to poke my artist and see if they can get me the icon and images for it.

The only thing lost was the source for the app. I recovered all the previous APKs for it so I have all previous versions of the app (That I saved APKs for at least). So all is not lost I guess. As long as I recovered the key store I should be good to go.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/a-little-more-app-stuff/feed/0App update and some thoughtshttp://thirdshifthero.com/app-update-and-some-thoughts/
http://thirdshifthero.com/app-update-and-some-thoughts/#respondSat, 14 May 2011 17:08:44 +0000http://thirdshifthero.com/?p=193[...]]]>Put out an update for the ED app to fix a force close issue when using landscape. Thanks to the user who put in that error report.

Also I was looking at the demographics of my app and while most of the people are from the US it seems a fair bit are in Europe, the most being Germany. If anyone knows some other languages I may think about localizing the app in the future at least into German. Hit me up if interested.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/app-update-and-some-thoughts/feed/0New post on new domainhttp://thirdshifthero.com/new-post-on-new-domain/
http://thirdshifthero.com/new-post-on-new-domain/#respondSun, 01 May 2011 14:33:11 +0000http://thirdshifthero.com/?p=190[...]]]>I probably should have posted something about this on the old fridgewire domain, but I didn’t. Oh well.

I moved everything I had off of that domain to thirdshifthero.com. I am still working on the setup as I had a few other things to drag along with it. Things should be getting fleshed out in the future. I will not be putting the fridgewire forums back up, they were kind of a waste anyways. I backed it all up though so if anyone wants old posts of really really wants it back it is easy enough to restore. So right now it’s a new domain, with a new feed link and all that good stuff. Update your feeds if you use them and let me know if there are any problems hiding around the site.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/new-post-on-new-domain/feed/0ED app karma dice updatehttp://thirdshifthero.com/ed-app-karma-dice-update/
http://thirdshifthero.com/ed-app-karma-dice-update/#respondThu, 31 Mar 2011 03:44:42 +0000http://www.fridgewire.com/?p=187Just released an update for the dice roller that adds a check box to roll karma dice. This functions for both Classic and 3rd Edition. In the options there is a list to select which race/die value to use for Classic karma.
]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/ed-app-karma-dice-update/feed/0Back and ED app updatehttp://thirdshifthero.com/back-and-ed-app-update/
http://thirdshifthero.com/back-and-ed-app-update/#commentsFri, 25 Mar 2011 22:39:48 +0000http://www.fridgewire.com/?p=183[...]]]>Well I have been back from NZ for a couple weeks. Things have been busy, but it’s a good busy. I release v1.5 for the Earthdawn Dice Roller app. The update adds the much desired ability to use the Earthdawn Classic dice table and adds the ability to toggle a display for which dice values are being rolled. I didn’t put this in the change log anywhere, but I also made it so a bonus dice has and asterisk next to it so you can tell which dice are bonus dice. I am already working on v1.6 and have a working check box for karma dice in third edition. I need to implement it for classic still which takes a bit more work because if I am correct the steps are different for each race. I will probably put that in the options, because that isn’t something you should change every roll. I need to double check the rules to make sure I am getting this right. I will have to ask the ED community and make sure I am correct.
]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/back-and-ed-app-update/feed/2Too much too soonhttp://thirdshifthero.com/too-much-too-soon/
http://thirdshifthero.com/too-much-too-soon/#respondSun, 20 Feb 2011 08:52:33 +0000http://www.fridgewire.com/?p=178[...]]]>Holy crap… Life has been a flurry for the pas few months. I really haven’t had time to work on any of my projects. I actually decided to stop writing for Throw out the Dice and handed that over to Tim. He is still charging ahead with that even with the crazy stuff going on in his life.

I recently have been transitioning to a new position where I work and the process of applying for the job and then transitioning into it has sucked a great deal of life from me. Once things settle down at work I should be able to get my mind a little straight at least. The new position has kind of destroyed my blog title in some ways. I no longer work midnight and will be a normal day person most likely. It sort of makes me sad, but I had to go with it. I’ll probably keep the name of my blog and such because I really dig it.

In the midst of the job change I will be leaving on a trip to New Zealand for a couple weeks. I am hoping to really use the time to take it easy and clear my head and get a somewhat fresh start when I get back. Realistically, I probably will work harder to catch up from being gone for two weeks. In any case I can work on some things there and on the loooooong flight. Maybe I can finish another story and get that posted. We shall see…

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/too-much-too-soon/feed/0Site stuffhttp://thirdshifthero.com/site-stuff/
http://thirdshifthero.com/site-stuff/#respondSun, 23 Jan 2011 12:57:31 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=165Moved the site from it’s subdomain to the main fridgewire.com address. Messed up a bunch of crap in the process. Was a good night. I really broke the heck out of it.
]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/site-stuff/feed/0Earthdawn apphttp://thirdshifthero.com/earthdawn-app/
http://thirdshifthero.com/earthdawn-app/#commentsMon, 20 Dec 2010 12:19:38 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=163[...]]]>I suppose I should put at least some reference to my Earthdawn Dice Roller app on the Android market since this is the website I put on my developer account.

First, thanks to all the people who have downloaded it and are using it (about 20 of you at this time!). I appreciate the installs and I hope the app works well for you all. Feel free to drop comments and requests here if you have something you would like to see or just want to say something else.

Second, I am planning to recode a good portion of the app in the near future. I’m sure some people noticed but I am a big huge noob programmer. This is the only program I have written outside of the stuff I did for one class back in college. I am learning a great deal from this program and as a result need to redo some of my… they aren’t really mistakes…. but less than desirable programing techniques. Bear with me as I learn, things should only get better in time.

Last, I will toss up a tab on this site for my app(s) so I can leave specific information about each one. I will plan on having that up in the next couple days, if not sooner. I have plans to try making a really simple game to get more coding under my belt. Wish me luck!

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/earthdawn-app/feed/2Planshttp://thirdshifthero.com/plans/
http://thirdshifthero.com/plans/#respondFri, 10 Dec 2010 19:56:19 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=161[...]]]>I’m guessing nobody has really noticed much, but the www.fridgewire.com page has been down for like a year or so. I never rebuilt it after wiping out the site due to some sneaky sneaky malware that got in. I have been thinking about what to do for a redesign and I have a few ideas and I will do a little more planning to get it all implemented. HTML/CSS are very much not a strength of mine, so this will be interesting. I will probably use something pre-packaged, but who knows. Maybe a streak of ambition will show itself with me. More likely I will try to con someone I know into building it. Only the future will know.
]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/plans/feed/0HOLY SH*T!!http://thirdshifthero.com/holy-sht/
http://thirdshifthero.com/holy-sht/#respondMon, 22 Nov 2010 08:06:19 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=158[...]]]>Wow it has been some time since posting. I got the yearning a few days ago and finally decided to make another post for fun. Things have been busy, mostly me trying to keep myself busy with projects and stuff. Got some of the programming off the ground and am taking it very very slowly so I don’t rupture my brain. Maybe someday I will finish it.

Pick up a cheap server tower and have converted that into the server for my house. It a Dell PowerEdge T110 that I got for cheap. Right now it is running Ubuntu Server(64) 10.10 with Virtualbox running more servers that are the main controllers. Right now I only have one running DNS and DHCP for the house, but more will come soon. I’m kinda experimenting with virtualizing as much as I can. I tried using KVW, which Ubuntu has built in, but I ran into troubles with network devices. I couldn’t get KVM to share one network device with the host and all the VMs. I know that would be a major choke point, but my traffic is pretty low as it is. I’ll mess with stuff more and see where things go. I’m going to try to get my thirdshifthero.com domain pointed to my hardware still. Made progress but still far off.

Got some new airsoft goodies also. I’ll probably talk about those and throw up some pictures when we do our winter game. Should be a blast.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/holy-sht/feed/0Too late to beginhttp://thirdshifthero.com/too-late-to-begin/
http://thirdshifthero.com/too-late-to-begin/#respondMon, 06 Sep 2010 04:58:13 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=155[...]]]>I kinda have a sad dilemma going on. For a long time I have avoided anything to do with programming. I had a class in college that pretty much destroyed any desire for me to learn it at all. Now, about 4 years later I have been glancing back at it longingly, but without any knowledge or base to begin. I sort of feel it’s “too late” to do anything about it. Most of it is technically beyond me, I haven’t looked at a math formula since getting out of college, and I don’t feel I have the immense amount of time to put into learning something so complex.

The major disappointment for me is thinking about all the stuff that was explained to me so long ago and finally GETTING IT! It took years for me to finally understand what we were doing and probably was the result of actually learning the math behind it as the last class I took (good timing right). I have dabbled very slightly, but soon realize that this is all way way beyond my knowledge in every way.

Well, I guess I haven’t given up completely. I am looking for small ways to practice at all. I have done very very small amount of addon coding for WoW, but that is about it. Are they any good languages to use to get into it? Is there a good way to get into it? I know there is no quick way to learn programming, I just want a little bit of knowledge with the ability to actually write a very simple code. Well that is my sad story. Any help is appreciated.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/too-late-to-begin/feed/0Sonshine 2010!http://thirdshifthero.com/sonshine-2010/
http://thirdshifthero.com/sonshine-2010/#respondTue, 20 Jul 2010 05:49:08 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=153[...]]]>Got back a couple days ago from Sonshine festival in Willmar, MN. This is probably the seventh(?) year I have gone and it was a blast. The big highlight for me was seeing one of my favorite bands, Bleach, play again after they stopped six years ago. It was pretty rad. Can’t wait to hear their new album when it get released.

The O.C. Supertones also played a show after stopping 5 years ago and that was a rad show as well. Good to hear some ska again. Seeing both of these bands really made the trip for me. I listened to these guys for a long time and Bleach is pretty much the band that got me into the music I listen to now.

Got to hear some pretty big bands as well. August Burns Red was there again and was a pretty hard core show as always. They are never a let down and it was a high energy and insane show. Saw Project 86 for the first time and was pretty impressed. They had a really solid live sound. I picked up their newest CD and so far I am really digging it. Check out the video for “The Destroyer” on their site. It is a good time.

This was my first time seeing Showbread live, and their first time at Sonshine. I really enjoyed that show. They played a couple songs I didn’t expect and I was happy about that. I managed to talk to Drew after the show for a couple moments also. Really nice guy, hope they keep making some solid music and the new album works out for them. They are releasing it for free on their site when it is recorded.

I also got to see a few bands from the Midwest who are “hometown” favorites of mine. Children 18:3 has been there ever since I can remember and is always a wild show. Your Memorial played late in the night, and was super metal. Can’t wait to hear their new record. The Suit was amazing as always and we picked up their new CD. I was surprised how much vocal talent they had going on. I didn’t remember that from last year. The first show we caught was And The Greatest of These. A security guard from the previous year was the singer in that band and they sounded awesome. I hope they stick together and we can see them next year.

The only thing that sucked was we got hit by severe weather the last day. Huge wind gusts and driving rain almost toppled out camp. It got so bad and because of the threat of possible tornadoes we had to head for shelter for about half an hour until things calmed down and it was looking safe. The weather was pretty wild. All in all it was a great time and I can’t wait for next year.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/sonshine-2010/feed/0Airsoft updatehttp://thirdshifthero.com/airsoft-update/
http://thirdshifthero.com/airsoft-update/#respondMon, 05 Jul 2010 07:23:30 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=148[...]]]>We finally got around to adding some more structures to our airsoft course and actually played some more games. A few new people started coming as well. It has been good all around. I took a solid hit to the lip which is still bruised and scabby, but it was worth playing still.

Dan go a few pictures to show a sort of overlay to our field. He standing on a car when he took it which is kind of the back end of the course that is shown in the pictures. There are a few things behind it but not too much. The first two pictures are supposed to be side by side. You can see the edge of the low barricade in the first picture that is on the left side in the second. The table in the second picture is a shooting bench actually. The third picture you can see more of the course straight on. It is tough to see the low profile objects in the distance. All these pictures were taken before we added some “graffiti” to our buildings. Everything looks much more spaced out in the pictures in my opinion. The ranges are really good and are not too close so the hits hurt a ton, but not too far away where hitting something is impossible.

I also have a few pics of us playing to give a feel for being near some of the cover. This house is the larger building on the left side of the first course picture.

This is on the opposite side of the same house in the picture above. We tossed a couple tires on the corner to give a bit of cover.

This is one of the low barricades they are coming around.

This is one of our corner walls near the back edge of the course. These are actually one of our favorite things it seems. They get used quite a bit. You can also see some of the “graffiti” in a couple of the pictures. More will get added in the future to make it look like it has been layered over time. It really helped make the obstacles more interesting.

There is a quick tour of what we have been doing. Hopefully I will have more in the future. We are still planning on expanding the course outwards a bit as it is kind of narrow right now. I’ll post more when something happens.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/airsoft-update/feed/0Tech frustrationshttp://thirdshifthero.com/tech-frustrations/
http://thirdshifthero.com/tech-frustrations/#respondMon, 21 Jun 2010 08:57:17 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=137[...]]]>I have mentioned this to a few other people, so I thought I would toss some thoughts out on it here. I’m sure lots of people would disagree with me.

Basically I am somewhat frustrated with the lack of anything new in the tech world. Yeah, we keep getting faster chips that run cooler and are smaller, but that isn’t anything new. That is refining something. It is not groundbreaking. It isn’t going to make a huge change to our lives anytime soon. It may contribute to future innovation, but right now it’s just the same thing, but better. The things I am curious about seem a few years out. Things like home quantum computing, or full AR on a large scale. It almost feels like AR should have happened by now on a slightly larger scale. I am disappointed we don’t have a solid wireless network that is compatible with all devices. Am I the only person who thinks that is possible and should be here by now? Maybe I am expecting too much right now. It seems like we have the capacity for great things, but feels like we are moving so slow…

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/tech-frustrations/feed/0Wait… What?http://thirdshifthero.com/wait-what/
http://thirdshifthero.com/wait-what/#respondMon, 07 Jun 2010 09:04:30 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=132[...]]]>Apparently I have this blog that I write in and stuff, but I feel like I haven’t put anything of value in it for the last month or two. That probably won’t change tonight at all. I haven’t done much with anything lately. I have been writing up some documents for the space game and I wish I could share them, but I don’t wanna ruin anything for the players.

Airsoft is at a standstill. Very few games and no building lately. I haven’t worked on any tech projects at all. It is just kinda blah right now. Maybe I’ll have something to report in the near future, but right now ain’t much happening. I need to get motivated on something.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/wait-what/feed/0The Road to… Somewhere Elsehttp://thirdshifthero.com/the-road-to-somewhere-else/
http://thirdshifthero.com/the-road-to-somewhere-else/#respondSun, 30 May 2010 07:58:18 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=130[...]]]>I finally started writing the space game adventure. I really really suck at actually writing stuff out. I usually just wing it when I do things. This may end up pretty complex and it is a good thing I am writing it out. I have decided to run this as a very open ended adventure. I am basically writing two part. The setting which will include the system and what is in it, and the time line which is what has happened and what is happening in the system. I am avoiding planned encounters for the most part and going with events as they unfold. I am hoping the feel of the games comes off alright. I think most people are expecting more hack and slash than I have planned, but I am putting in a good amount, more than most of my games. I tend to prefer very little combat and much more talking and non-combat actions. I don’t have a problem with combat I just find it to be quite tedious and of very little interest. I love it when I get the opportunity to just sit back and watch the players interact among themselves or even with an NPC. I have been much more interested in that aspect with the characters I play as well. I have made characters who are technically combat characters that I still don’t like to do combat with, unless it has a really good RP element. I just tend to find combat the easy way out and not very fun in RPGs.
]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/the-road-to-somewhere-else/feed/0Here we go!http://thirdshifthero.com/here-we-go/
http://thirdshifthero.com/here-we-go/#respondSun, 23 May 2010 06:45:15 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=128[...]]]>I finally started it today. The one shot for the space game is going. It appears it will take two sessions, but I am alright with that. It is nice to get a good look at things in action. I get to take a look at things that need much more polish and what is missing. I have got a list of things that I will be filling in. It’s a little clunky starting off. I need to get a nice cheat sheet for the cortex system. I am using my Serenity GM screen as one, but a few things are different and need reworking. The one nice thing is that people are handling the military style very well. That may change if there is a great deal of conflict in the future, but for now I am happy with it.

I’ll have some more up after we play the next session. I will probably ask a few questions on the forums too about it if you follow stuff on there.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/here-we-go/feed/0More gaming experimentshttp://thirdshifthero.com/more-gaming-experiments/
http://thirdshifthero.com/more-gaming-experiments/#respondSun, 16 May 2010 09:35:59 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=126[...]]]>I am really lucky because I have the time to game twice a week. We started out gaming on Saturdays with an old roommate of mine and then I started running a Shadowrun game on Mondays. When he moved away we just kept doing Saturday gaming with me or someone else running a game. I also play airsoft on Saturdays and this can lead to some rather crappy gaming sessions because I am so freaking tired. The group of us that plays airsoft decided to not really use this as a normal gaming day and use it for quick games, one shots, and experiments.

Me and my brother talked about some ideas and there we some really cool ideas. He seems to like creating an immersive atmosphere and has some really good ideas for that. I have a few things I would like to try that I don’t want to commit to a full game. I think quite a few of our experiments deal with running horror games. That will be interesting because neither of us have ever ran anything like horror, except that Ravenloft module, but that doesn’t count. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future. For now I need to get characters written for the Space game one shot and hope everything works out.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/more-gaming-experiments/feed/0New game thoughtshttp://thirdshifthero.com/123/
http://thirdshifthero.com/123/#respondMon, 10 May 2010 09:06:16 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=123[...]]]>I have started doing a bit of work on the Cortex system sci-fi space game I have been setting up. I realized that this is kinda a big experiment for me. I haven’t really had to develop a world from scratch that is this large. I realize I am only taking a small part of it and focusing heavily on that aspect. I have also used another big experiment by giving the player a lot of say in what happens and what is in the world. I have said very little about where things are and what actually exists. This is very intentional and the few places my players have made are great. If this world catches on it could give our group a good sandbox to play some great games in. I already have a few ideas for future ones, but I should really stick to writing the one coming up. It seems we have hit a good point in time to start it also. We just got a new player, schedules are clearing out, and we just finished a game recently.

I have been doing some thinking about what technology exists in this world. It is interesting to see what other people come up with and how it relates to your views of the world. I think I am swinging a bit low tech and may need to bring things up a notch. It seems some people like the tech level I have in my head though. We will be talking about a few things before the game. I hope giving my players a great deal of power in creating the universe actually gives them some attachment to it. If people like the setting and are engaged with it the games will almost always be better.

I sure I will have some more thoughts about all this in the near future.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/123/feed/0New Airsoft Gun!!!http://thirdshifthero.com/new-airsoft-gun/
http://thirdshifthero.com/new-airsoft-gun/#respondWed, 05 May 2010 22:48:18 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=120[...]]]>Finally got my new airsoft gun! It’s a Classic Army M249. Got to test shoot it a little bit and it seems pretty slick. I’m looking forward to getting it out on the field on Saturday. I’ll post some more thoughts on it as soon as I get to try it out properly.

Here are a couple pics for now. We all know PJ pants are tactical gear.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/new-airsoft-gun/feed/0Small town riothttp://thirdshifthero.com/small-town-riot/
http://thirdshifthero.com/small-town-riot/#respondMon, 26 Apr 2010 07:59:34 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=115[...]]]>We got to take our airsoft course for a test run on Saturday. It was pretty dang fun. We need to make some adjustments to the layout, but overall it is pretty solid. We all had a ton of fun with that area and are really looking forward to expanding it. It was much more fast paced than we usually play and cover was much more important. Sidearms actually came into play a few times, and the sniper owned the course until we banned it. Expanding the course out more will really help with some of the issues we were having. Also we are planning some small pieces of cover that should even things up a bit. It’s gonna be pretty rockin’.

We are also trying to find a few more people to play. Hopefully we can get some of the other players we know to come out our way. We have played a few other places, but so far our is optimal for a few reasons. The biggest one being private property. Terrain is good. We have free reign to build. Plus we get free meals sometimes! I’ll see if I can get the pics from my bro and post them up here. They didn’t turn out great but they aren’t that bad.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/small-town-riot/feed/0Making a cityhttp://thirdshifthero.com/making-a-city/
http://thirdshifthero.com/making-a-city/#commentsSun, 18 Apr 2010 08:53:06 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=112[...]]]>So, I pretty much have the best GF ever. She already bought me my b-day present. Tickets to see Rush! I am beyond stoked for this. She is a sweetheart.

Finally wrote the last little bit for the Space game one shot. I just need to make characters now and I will be good to go. I suck at writing games lately. Things just aren’t coming together as well as I would like. I think it mostly has to do with my brain not working. Oh well.

I started playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 recently with my roommate. It’s a pretty dang fun game. I think I like it better than COD:MW2 for multiplayer at least. I am having a tougher time with it I think. I’m sure I just need time to figure it out.

Well out airsoft project is officially under way. We built our first building today. Well it is actually 4 walls screwed together, but it is a start. It went pretty quick once we figured things out. We plan on possibly building another one this week after touching up the one we just made. It needs a few more screws and some bracing just for good measure. It is surprisingly sturdy as we have it built right now, but a little more won’t hurt. I would rather play it safe and not have a wall fall on me. I am pretty excited about that in any case. We hope to get two more buildings up soon and it looks like we can do that.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/making-a-city/feed/1Playing with beta kittyhttp://thirdshifthero.com/playing-with-beta-kitty/
http://thirdshifthero.com/playing-with-beta-kitty/#respondSun, 11 Apr 2010 09:26:59 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=109[...]]]>I have been messing with the new beta for Ubuntu 10.4 or “Lucid Lynx” and it is so affectionately termed. So far it is looking pretty shiny. I guess the most noticeable change is the open/close/minimize buttons have been moved to the left side of the window in Mac fashion. I re-skinned it so my poor little Windows addled brain can handle it. They changed a few default programs which is not surprising I guess. Things seem pretty solid so far, but many packages are missing/incomplete because of the beta status. I had a bitch of a time installing virtualbox. I think one of my packages messed up and I just need to reinstall it for some reason. I can’t expect full function right now I guess, although it should be dropping pretty soon so I hope everything in in by then for my upgrades. This is supposed to be the new LTR so I will probably keep with it. My main server, which is only running DHCP right now, is running Karmic server edition which is nice and stable right now. I need to debate whether to dist upgrade that or not when this stuff drops. If any linux users could advise me that would be great. I would like to start using linux more for my everyday stuff if I can.

I feel like I have amped up my computer work lately and feel like I have learned millions of new things in a short time. I keep trying things and I learn tons even if I fail. I think I may try and tackle an internal DNS server again. My last few attempts have met with defeat. If I can get and internal DNS up and running I may move ahead and get that static IP and try hosting something myself. I will take it slow for now. I don’t want to burn out too quick. IT is taking me a bit longer using Ubuntu server to set up everything, but at least I don’t have to shell out the cash for Windows Server.

I have hit a dead end with game writing lately. For some reason my brain is just not giving me anything. I can’t get motivated, and even when I am I can’t get any ideas to some out. I feel really crappy about the whole thing and hate letting my players down with crappy games. Maybe with our moving to one day a week I can sit out a few weeks to rest my head. Even though I have been running things pretty slim it still feels like somewhat of an overload. I may get too ambitious sometimes which may cause problems.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/playing-with-beta-kitty/feed/0Dunno what to dohttp://thirdshifthero.com/106/
http://thirdshifthero.com/106/#respondMon, 05 Apr 2010 06:42:01 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=106[...]]]>I feel a bazillion times better tonight. Saturdays are just way too long, even with naps. Maybe I will be productive tonight…. lol.

I managed to snag an old computer from work. It has no HDD or RAM, but I have that laying about. Unfortunately my problem is that I have no idea what to do with it. Before I had too many ideas and not enough computers. Now it is the opposite. I have two computers just sitting there empty, and one more that should be decommissioned, but comes in handy every now and then. Right now I am running a “domain server” for lack of a better term and a file/torrent server. My main computer is a Win 7 machine, and I have an old XP machine running next to me for general web surfingness and other such things. I had a machine for testing Linux stuff on but it was rarely used and the HDD was failing so I pulled it apart. I have contemplated a media server of some kind, but I don’t think that would get a lot of use. I only watch Netflix and Hulu on the internet and those don’t stream over a media server. We download videos so infrequently that it really isn’t worth it. We could just sync up our PCs to the Xbox and do it that way also. I am at a loss and it makes me sad. I suppose I could just make a Linux machine and put it on my KVM. Time will tell I guess.

I have fallen in love with <a href=”http://www.gog.com”>GoG.com</a>. Basically it sells old games, optimized for new computers, and DRM free. It picked up Might and Magic 1-6 and am having a blast. I have been playing through 4/5 and it brings back some good memories. I may have to fire up 3 and see how far I can get through that from memory lol. I also notice they had both Blake Stone games which I really loved back in the day. I may have to get one of those next.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/106/feed/0I hate titleshttp://thirdshifthero.com/i-hate-titles/
http://thirdshifthero.com/i-hate-titles/#respondSun, 04 Apr 2010 08:19:42 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=104[...]]]>I have a rampaging headache right now… I managed to get my TOTD post up, but it took me some time to just make it though it. I feel pretty crappy right now and I really shouldn’t I got tons of sleep and even took a nap. Maybe the nap did it, but I refuse to admit it because then my GF would be right

I am supposed to play a few songs at the Easter service this morning and I don’t know what insanity drove me to do that. I need about another week to be where I want to with the songs. I suppose I will just have to fake it through them like always. I’m sure being tired and feeling crappy won’t be a disadvantage at all…

I just realized how behind I am on writing the space game. I have the one shot mostly done, but I have yet to touch the main game at all. I have no solid story or plot at all. Things seem to have got away from me and my brain forgot about everything. Unfortunately these last few days have been rough on me for some reason. I don’t know why I am going so crazy. I just can’t wait to go to sleep today. My mind is in no shape to be writing anything for a game right now. I think I have way too many things I want to do with that game and I need to narrow it down a bit. There can always be more games, if it doesn’t suck. Well I could run another even if it does suck, but that may not be a good idea.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/i-hate-titles/feed/0http://thirdshifthero.com/101/
http://thirdshifthero.com/101/#respondMon, 29 Mar 2010 04:48:10 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=101[...]]]>Airsoft is in full swing finally and it is a good time! I usually lose, but oh well it is still a good time. We have been making some plans to build a course in one of our fields. We took a good look at it and started brain storming building designs right now. I guess I will be skeptical that it will happen until we get the first building started. I still have hope and it would be really awesome. Saturdays are a long day for me with airsoft and gaming and then working so I skipped posting last night to take it easy. I was pretty crazy by the end of my shift…

Gaming has been a little sketchy as of late. I haven’t been motivated, John will be starting a new shift at work, and people have been busy quite often. I’m not worried the group will fall apart or anything. We have these times before and it will pass. It is just kinda stressful when it happens. We have some big plans for gaming and I hope we can keep the whole group around for them. Tuck is planning an Earthdawn game and I have the space game. I am encouraging John to set up a story based game. His sandbox game is going pretty good and I am impressed with him so far. I wish I had his ability to use NPCs.

I’m rocking my new HP Touchsmart notebook right now and I love the crap out of it. It is a snappy computer running Win 7 64 bit with 6 Gb ram and a 1.3GHz Dual Core processor. The touch ability of it is nice and accurate. Construction is solid. I also really like the fingerprint reader. I use the crap out of it. The only issue would be the screen is a bit too glossy and can be tough to see in bright light or from the sides. I can work with that though. Overall I give it a thumbs up for awesome.

I still don’t know what I am going to write for TOTD tonight. I’m sure I will figure out something.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/101/feed/0The days grow longerhttp://thirdshifthero.com/the-days-grow-longer/
http://thirdshifthero.com/the-days-grow-longer/#respondSun, 21 Mar 2010 04:56:29 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=99[...]]]>Holy crap am I tired. I must be getting old or some lame shit like that.

We did some airsoft today and I got smoked pretty dang hard. It was still fun, but I need to take a look at my gun and make some adjustments. It seems to be firing bad. Plus, I did some really dumb stuff that got me hit. I’ll have to talk to Tuck and see what we can do.

I have been reading “The Legend of the Jade Phoenix” trilogy. They are three books from the Battletech universe, and holy hell are they good. I have enjoyed the heck out of them. The back story and different cultures are well defined. It makes me want to play some Battletech.

Actually me and John started playing Mecwarrior 4 Mercs again. MW5 needs to come out about yesterday. I am really looking forward to that game. MW4 was tons of fun and I could use an updated game.

I should be getting my HP Touchsmart Notebook on Tuesday. I will throw up some thoughts about that when I get a chance to feel it up a bit. Apparently Sprint is getting the Android 2.1 update out to my HTC Hero fairly soon. Looking forward to that quite a bit.

I am sort of scatterbrainy right now. Maybe something with content will come out in the future.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/the-days-grow-longer/feed/0Where is the time going?http://thirdshifthero.com/where-is-the-time-going/
http://thirdshifthero.com/where-is-the-time-going/#respondMon, 15 Mar 2010 07:49:53 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=96[...]]]>It seems like the last week flew by. I was busy most of the week with a trip to IKEA, which was epic, and setting up a clinic for work. The weekend seems much shorter also. I had to rush last night with DST and tonight I have extra stuff. This whole actually working thing really sucks.

Airsoft on Saturday was a no go. Everyone else was busy and the weather was crap. I finally got my new Tactical Tailor holster for my Five-Seven and it is sexy time. It fits like a dream and doesn’t mess with the slide like my other (cheaper) holsters have. I really want to get that out in the field.

I broke down and bought the HP Touchsmart notebook finally. They had a really good deal that saved me like $500 on it. I am pretty pumped to get it. I am really going to try using it for gaming applications and such. I will probably post about how that works out in the future. I am really excited to get it, but I spent way more money than I should have this month. I will have to save some money in the coming months.

Don’t have much else to say right now. Seems like life is busy right now, and boring. When something happens I will have words to say.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/where-is-the-time-going/feed/0Once again it is timehttp://thirdshifthero.com/once-again-it-is-time/
http://thirdshifthero.com/once-again-it-is-time/#respondSun, 07 Mar 2010 09:45:31 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=94[...]]]>We started our weekly schedule for airsoft today. We will be playing every week, if weather permits, until winter. It was pretty dang awesome today. Even with the snow on the ground it was really nice out. We got a few good games in and it really wasn’t a steamroll for either team. I only took one hit to the face which is pretty sweet. Getting to use all the new toys was pretty sweet. I need to look into a new 40mm grenade shell. The one I have it pretty crappy and I think a slightly higher quality one would help tons. We also started playing with black BBs which is awesome. The old white ones we could use as tracers and as a result had to aim very little. The black BBs make aiming more important and makes it a bit harder to get kills.

We talked a bit about our building plans for a course and we are being allowed to use a decent sized area to build a CQB area. We still need to do lots of planning and we are just talking right now so who knows if it will happen. At least we have the space. Once the snow melts we can get building. We will also be able to play some scenarios in the wood and the course, if we build it, and I am looking forward to that a great deal.

I brought my LCP to shoot before we played some airsoft. This was the first chance I had to shoot it at all and that is a sweet little gun. There is a considerable amount of recoil because the gun is so light. The trigger pull is also really really long and kind of startling. I can’t wait to put a few more rounds through it. Overall I like it. I wouldn’t want to shoot it all day, but that isn’t what it is for. Once I get my mags for my AR I plan to get out and do a bit of shooting with that. I just gotta wait until they get here.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/once-again-it-is-time/feed/0http://thirdshifthero.com/89/
http://thirdshifthero.com/89/#respondThu, 04 Mar 2010 06:34:14 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=89[...]]]>Found out I got my tax return today so I ran out and bought myself a new present. I have been planning on getting it for awhile but it is now finally mine.

It’s a Smith & Wesson M&P with and EOTech holosight. It is very very pretty. S&W is a solid company and the gun feels nice. I have heard a lot of positive things about their ARs and other guns in general. EOTech stuff is just awesome. I am looking forward to giving the whole rig a go. I have 500 rounds and 4 Magpul PMAGS ordered and on the way right now. When they get here it is gonna be a good time.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/89/feed/0http://thirdshifthero.com/86/
http://thirdshifthero.com/86/#respondSun, 28 Feb 2010 10:06:22 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=86[...]]]>Wow writing here has completely slipped my mind. I feel like nothing has been done this week. I have a few projects I need to get done and a few games to prepare for.

My parents gave me their old laptop to get some data off. It is running windows ME and it hurts my soul. I am hoping it will be relatively simple. I finally have all the cables to hook it up to the network. I hate those adapters for the card slots. It’s hard to believe that a phone jack was more important than an Ethernet jack. Modems suck… a lot.

A also have been trying to get the IDE/SATA converter working on an old computer. It is not recognizing the HDD and I don’t know what is going on with it. I haven’t had much time to mess with it though. My computer area is getting pretty cluttered. I need to get some more power strips. That whole area need to be shuffled around. I will have to spend some time with those computers.

I picked up Oblivion the other day. I forgot how much I enjoy games like that. I have been playing it pretty heavily. I’m sure in the next week I will have the editor up and running and be doing something with that. I have a problem with making half finished projects with games. I think I have only finished two things and both of those were pretty small. I should do some scripting. It would be good to get a feel for basic programming. Maybe if I learned how to do it I would enjoy it…. probably not.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/86/feed/0Like a Phoenixhttp://thirdshifthero.com/like-a-phoenix/
http://thirdshifthero.com/like-a-phoenix/#respondSun, 21 Feb 2010 11:10:20 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=83[...]]]>So I ended taking down the entire site to fix a possible issue with malware. I don’t know what it was or how it got there, but there were a few people who let me know their anti-virus programs were triggering on my site. I tested it and had it happen as well. I should have most of it up pretty soon.

I took the opportunity to replace my theme and get some much needed upgrades in. I will be doing the forum very soon. I am just waiting on the database restore. Hopefully that goes well…. This also give me a good opportunity to get a decent backup and maintenance schedule going. I really need to get some good backups for the whole site. At least WordPress has a really simple restore. The forum is not as kind so far.

Things will get cleaned up here shortly. I will keep everyone posted on the status if something goes wrong.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/like-a-phoenix/feed/0Work, work, work…http://thirdshifthero.com/work-work-work/
http://thirdshifthero.com/work-work-work/#respondSun, 14 Feb 2010 08:29:55 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=79[...]]]>Not real work obviously. I never do that. I have lots of little projects kinda going along right now and a bunch of things to do at home.

The forums for Throw out the Dice have been set up over at http://forum.fridgewire.com so if you read this and have any interest in gaming at all go sign up and say hi. It will make me feel better about myself.

I have made considerable progress on the space game. I have finalized using the Cortex system for the game and have been working up gear specifics for most of the night so far. The one shot should be ready by March if I keep it up. I tend to go light on rules and numbers when designing things so the Cortex system is a perfect fit for that. I’m also hoping to recruit one or two more people for the game before starting it. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. In any case, after this post I will probably be working on Writing up the worlds for both games.

We took a couple weeks off from my Shadowrun game, but will be playing it again on Monday. Looking forward to it. I haven’t ran a game for two weeks or so and it is kinda strange. I hope I still know what I am doing.

I managed to get another computer put together at my house and plan on getting amother OS running on that, but I haven’t decided what yet. I really have not *need* for it right now, but I want something on it just because. I also had an issue with my DHCP server that knocked out our internet for awhile. I rebooted it for some updates and when it came back up the DHCP service did not restart. It is running Ubuntu 9.10 server. I tried “service dhcpd restart” and “/etc/init.d/dhcpd restart” and neither of those worked. The first found no service named dhcpd and the other said the path was invalid. I usually use Webmin to start/stop my servers, but obviously I couldn’t because nothing had a valid IP. Is there a command I am missing or did I do something wrong? It would be nice to know the command to get the service running again.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/work-work-work/feed/0Lots of gaming stuffhttp://thirdshifthero.com/lots-of-gaming-stuff/
http://thirdshifthero.com/lots-of-gaming-stuff/#respondSun, 07 Feb 2010 11:05:38 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=77[...]]]>I have been trying to get the forum up and running for use with Throw out the Dice. It looks like the skeleton is up and ready to go right now. I eventually need to add more boards, change the placeholder logo, change some image files, and get the user groups in line. I decided to leave open registrations and just delete any spam accounts that come along. I have been getting one or two every few days so it has been manageable, just annoying. The big thing is going to be selling this to people. It just opened up and looking at empty boards as a user is not a good thing. I have been starting topics in the empty boards to give people something to come to. I suppose I just need to give it some time and promote it a little bit. I suppose if anyone is reading this please hop over there by clicking the link on the side and make an account. We need a few good conversations to start up.

I don’t know what it was with last week, but I don’t think I got anything done. The funny thing is I felt like I didn’t do anything. My brain is kind of missing things it seems. Hopefully I get back on track this week although things are not starting off too well.

I am quite anxious to start up Shadowrun again. Other people have been running games, and while it has been nice to be a player, I really want to get the SR plot moving again. I have moved back a bit from the heavy writing for the SR game and decided to give it a bit more free form. I have some decent hooks in place that I hope will work out well.

I am hoping to have the one shot for the space game ready sometime in March, but this is a hope more than a deadline. I have to iron out one or two rule related things and then write out the one shot plot. I have a general idea of it, but it needs to be finalized. Not that it is anything too crazy or ground breaking.

As I said, I have been playing much more recently and the GMs running the games are relatively new at it. The games have been really enjoyable for me though overall and have been picking up. I have been noticing lots of things recently while watching other people GM. I have mostly noticed all the things I could do much better while running my games. I have noticed my NPCs could use a little more work and definition. The lesser reoccurring NPCs are not as defined and recognizable as they should be in my opinion. I think I need to pick that up and really work them out. I also need to watch traits and flaws and bring them into play better. I feel like I have been missing some of them completely from an RP standpoint. The players in the SR game have given me some good stuff to work with and I need to develop it. I suppose it is a good thing to notice all this. Hopefully I can get better at it in the long run.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/lots-of-gaming-stuff/feed/0Fixing things uphttp://thirdshifthero.com/fixing-things-up/
http://thirdshifthero.com/fixing-things-up/#respondTue, 02 Feb 2010 07:26:14 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=75[...]]]>Tonight I have been fixing up all the stuff attached to the fridgewire domain. I have done some cleanup and updates on the blog and forums. I am trying to make it so people using the blog and log in with their blogger accounts to leave comments, but the plugin I picked up is not working it seems. I’ll have to keep working on that.

The forum seems to be working and ready to go. I would like to find a purpose for it in the near future, but I don’t know what as of yet. I have offered to let Throw out the Dice use it for discussion, but haven’t really pursued that. I also figure I could just use it for the gaming group, but we are all so close it doesn’t make much sense. I would really like for a forum for Throw Out the Dice. We have a few people not form the area and I would really like to get some discussions started up with them. I learned from writing on that blog that even though I am giving advice in a sense, I really have a lot to learn and sharing with others is really helpful to me. I may bring that up to Tim again since he is now far away and it would connect him to us a little better.

I am continuing with the writing for the space game. I am focusing on the one shot adventure right now. I want to run that and see if the system works with the alterations and to see if the world meshes and feels alright. It is not anything ground breaking so I think it should all work out fine. I am also hoping my artist is going to stick with me. They have gotten busy with real life and I haven’t been in very good contact. I have faith they will deliver. If things turn out well I may toss a few pieces of art up here (if they are ok with that). We shall see in the long run.

I should bounce the idea of a wiki for the space game off my group again. I would like to give them a place they can find information without consulting me too much. That was one issue when doing things in Saratta. Tim was the only person who knew what was going on in that world so I had to consult with him on many things. I took more liberties than most people also. I am sure others needed more info from him. I would like to avoid some of that in the future with world information already out there. I’ll have to run it by a few people and see if they would use it. I am really the only person who uses internet solutions for anything. I may be able to force them to use it in some ways. I guess time will tell.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/fixing-things-up/feed/0http://thirdshifthero.com/73/
http://thirdshifthero.com/73/#respondSun, 31 Jan 2010 10:31:23 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=73[...]]]>Man I am bored. I have been doing a touch of studying for the N+ Exam, but it is starting to bore the shit out of me. I know I need to get moving on it but ugh…. it’s just soul rending. Eventually I will get my act together and just get the crap done. Then I get to move onto A+…. yay….

I finally have my server up and running somewhat. I have a DHCP server running along with an Apache server that obviously works only internally. My next goal is to configure my DNS zones which still kinda confuses me. I am using Ubuntu Server 9.10 running BIND and I am doing most of the configuration using Webmin. The DHCP was easy enough and the web server was already configured, but my previous work with the DNS stuff has yielded little. I am kind of confused on how the zones need to be set up. First do I need to set up one zone for my internal network and then one for my external domain? I guess I don’t really know what I need to do. Eventually I am going to move my externally hosted domain over to my own hardware and that whole setup is just a bit fuzzy. Any advice on the subject would be helpful.

I have decided I need to pick up the pace for the space game. I also need a better name than “the space game” so any ideas are welcome. I am going to try setting aside one hour a week just to work on gaming stuff only. I will probably put in more time throughout the week, but this is just dedicated time specifically for this. I am trying to collaborate with a few people as well so that may hold things up. I can still do lots of game/world writing for weeks to come. I have been considering using a wiki to keep track of information on the world. I have heard this is a really good way, but I don’t really know many people who have used that.

On a side not to people in my gaming group: We seem to be swapping games quite a bit and I was wondering if we want to keep a Google Calendar with a schedule that shows what game we will be playing that day or if it is canceled. Thoughts on that? I don’t mind keeping it going and I can toss it up on my site for quick access. Also I have a forum sitting an doing nothing would anyone want to use it for gaming info or even Throw out the Dice? Feedback appreciated if any of you kids read this.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/73/feed/0New gunhttp://thirdshifthero.com/new-gun/
http://thirdshifthero.com/new-gun/#respondThu, 28 Jan 2010 22:23:08 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=70[...]]]>I finally picked up my new gun. I decided to go with the Ruger LCP. So far I like it quite a bit. It is much smaller and lighter than my other carry gun (Obviously, my other was an XD .45 Compact). It doesn’t feel bulky or seem like it sticks out a lot. As soon as it warms up I’ll be out at my parents house to break it in a bit. I hear these need a few rounds through them to fix some jamming problems. I am looking forward to that. I left some shiny pics at the bottom of the post.

Also, my brother, Tuck, just submitted his carry permit application. Should only be thirty days for him!

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/new-gun/feed/0I built me a castle, with dragons and kingshttp://thirdshifthero.com/i-built-me-a-castle-with-dragons-and-kings/
http://thirdshifthero.com/i-built-me-a-castle-with-dragons-and-kings/#commentsSun, 24 Jan 2010 08:56:21 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=63[...]]]>I finally saw Avatar in 3D a few days ago and thought I would share my thoughts on it. Pretty much every review of it is right on the money. The plot is Dances with Wolves/ Pocahontas/ and a good dash of Ferngully. It is pretty transparent and predictable. I’m not saying it is terrible, it’s just nothing new. I don’t think the point of the movie was the story though, or at least I hope not. I was hoping for something a little more anthropological, but this is Ferngully with big blue furries and not a movie adaptation of Speaker for the Dead. If you read anywhere that the CG for this movie was good they are wrong. It was not good, it was FUCKING AMAZING! The CG all looked real. The scenes of the forest were amazing and detailed. I can’t describe it. Go see it just for that if nothing else. The 3D was something new for me. I always found 3D lame and hokey. This also changed my perception of that. It blended so well that it actually added to the feel of the movie. It gave the world a great deal of depth and a sense of space. There were only a few times that things were annoying. If a person was off the side of the screen they seemed blurry and distracting. That only happened a couple times though and I will forgive. I was sitting on the edge of the theater also so that may be caused the problem. I also found out those glasses really strain my eyes.

So my love for Google has increased. I found templates for Google Docs spreadsheets for SR and D&D character sheets. I’ll probably we using these more and more. I like using technology with my gaming stuff. I’ll probably start laptop GMing once I get a new desktop. I can get it streamlined for use while gaming. Maybe he multiple work spaces that Ubuntu has will be handy for that. I’ll have to see what types of apps I can get for Linux. I suppose I could just toss a virtual windows machine on there with Virtualbox. In any case I am looking forward to trying it out.

Me and Dan checked out some guns at the local sporting good store. I have been planning on buying a pocket pistol and narrowed my choices down to a Ruger LCP and the Micro Eagle. I’m thinking about picking up the LCP. It is a nice gun and pretty much everything I want. We also checked out some ARs. One had an Eotech holosight. I am completely in love with it. It works so slick and is nice as heck. I’m hoping for a good tax return this year….

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/i-built-me-a-castle-with-dragons-and-kings/feed/1Star Trek Online thoughtshttp://thirdshifthero.com/star-trek-online-thoughts/
http://thirdshifthero.com/star-trek-online-thoughts/#commentsSun, 17 Jan 2010 10:31:56 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=60[...]]]>As I stated earlier I pre-ordered a copy of Star Trek Online and got a beta key with that. I have played for a few days and have been asked by some of my roommates and friends what I think about it. I haven’t been able to give a good answer to it yet. I guess this will be my attempt at that.

As far as an MMO goes this game lacks that feeling quite a bit in my opinion. I admit that I am not a “go out and group” kind of person in these games though. I much prefer to do my own thing and group only when asked. The automatic instancing for some missions is really handy. It makes group missions much easier without standing somewhere shouting “LFG” for an hour. I see this being a problem for early zones as the game ages. Sort of the same problem with WoW and finding low level instance groups.

The missions are pretty basic. You can’t go too crazy with games like this I guess. Most missions are “Kill X enemies/squadrons” or “Go to X objects”. There are quests that chain themselves through a series of alternating space and ground missions, which is pretty cool. I think that pulls things together and makes the story flow much better. There are some daily quests which you have to do 3 team missions that involve a large group of players. It is fun to destroy things in large groups, but doing those quests over and over again is kinda repetitive. Considering the team missions are killing 8 squadrons of enemies. Basically it is killing 24 squads with a 5 minute forced break in between.

Combat is interesting at least. My one grip is that space combat is a little slow. As you advance they give you enough buttons to push (I am still pretty low so this may get better), but positioning and movement are very slow. You have shields on each side of your ship and once those are gone attack damage your ship’s structure. Turning to soak attack with shields that are not depleted is a good tactic, but is can take ages (or so it seems) to turn to switch which shield they are hitting. Weapon placement on your ship is a fun thing in my mind. You have front and rear weapon placements. I can have 2 front and one rear right now. Each weapon has a firing arc. So if I am broad side I can hit with my front and rear weapons at the same time. Depending on how your firing arcs are set up you can create different combination of weapons for different tactics.

Ground combat has me undecided right now. I really like it. I think it is cool to run around on the ground blasting stuff. Your away team is really helpful and has good support. You have decent control over then and they are not overly retarded. However, it often seems waaaaaaaaaaaaay too easy. I have little regard for my safety and don’t notice it at all. My team keeps my shields and health up so I can punch in faces all day with little strategy. I get 4 away team members right now and unless it gets harder they should drop one of them in my opinion. Maybe I get five… can’t remember. The combat system is simple as of now. Your weapon has two attacks, plus you get a melee attack. You get another ability based on what “kit” you are wearing. Certain types of attacks have a chance to make your enemy vulnerable to another type. Pretty basic.

Now my list of random pros. First, it looks really sweet. The ships and great is awesome looking. Second, character creation is very detailed. Think Oblivion/Fallout 3 slider style customization, but you can understand it. They also have a biography box and the option to enter a first, middle, and last name. It is nice to see RP is at least considered. The environments are all really accepting of RP. Last, it is not overly complex. This is a strange one, but I tried Eve Online and that was so confusing that it was no fun. This game is simple at the start and keeps offering more as you learn.

Here are my cons. First, The game needs lots of polish. I will elaborate after this, but it is rough. Second, missions, tooltips, and other things can be rather vague or unclear. A lot of the time I have no idea where to go for a mission. That needs to be addressed. Last, scaling difficulty seems a bit wonky. Some parts are ball crushingly hard and others are way way too easy. I have been sticking to a pretty linear path for questions. Maybe this is just me though.

Now about the polish comment. I know this is a beta but there are some really really hefty bugs out there right now. Sometimes on ground missions your team won’t show up or you spawn as your ship. If you are alone you will get destroyed. The servers are relatively unstable. It is good they caught it now so it can be worked out. I think more people are playing than they expected for the beta. There are some features that could be really really cool if they expanded them. You can access the bridge of your ship and walk around but that is the only place. I heard they are going to open up the ship more so you can walk around it and explore. I hope this happens and they allow you to bring friends on board. That would make the game a pile of fun. I also hope they offer the ability to beam down to Earth. That would just be a nifty feature, but not a game breaker.

think once release comes and things are ironed out it will be a pretty good game. These are just my opininos and take them for what they are worth. I’m sure I will have more to say as I play the beta more and once it is released. I hope it does well, but I don’t see it ever getting as popular as something like WoW.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/star-trek-online-thoughts/feed/1I have been beatenhttp://thirdshifthero.com/i-have-been-beaten/
http://thirdshifthero.com/i-have-been-beaten/#respondSat, 16 Jan 2010 02:08:09 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=57[...]]]>That damn laptop won. I was working on getting the drivers for the wireless card, but the adapter for the ethernet card decided to physically break on me. So I tore the damn thing down. Eventually I will put it back together in some way and do something with it. I really don’t know what though. I just need to get a frame for the screen. hehe.

At least with that somewhat out of the way I can start on my next project of setting up that little god awful print server. If it helps me get old computer parts out of my house it must be a good thing. I hope I won’t pull my hair out too much. I suppose if I do I tend to learn a lot more… damn…

I have done almost nothing with virtualization. I have decided to experiment a little bit with it for desktop environments. I like keeping things seperate on my systems. I will probably we running some business stuff and I don’t know if I want to do it all with Google docs and such. I kinda like having a desktop and complete offline access. I figure if I create a virtual machine on a shared drive I can access my “business desktop” from any one of my computers when needed and still keep the system “away” from my personal systems. I’ll see how it works and decide from there. Otherwise this could be a great excuse to buy another netbook.

Started playing the Star Trek Online beta. I like it so far. I will throw out some more solid thoughts later.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/i-have-been-beaten/feed/0It’s ok. I’ll live to fight another day.http://thirdshifthero.com/its-ok-ill-live-to-fight-another-day/
http://thirdshifthero.com/its-ok-ill-live-to-fight-another-day/#respondSun, 10 Jan 2010 07:06:51 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=54[...]]]>Just finished the second to last (I think) episode of Dollhouse… HOLY SHIT FUCK! I don’t even know what to say. It was crazy as hell and explains almost every question I had from Epitaph back in first season. Things usually don’t seem to surprise me for some reason in TV and movies, but this really got me. Actually a few things did. The end should be totally epic. I’ll need to pick up both seasons on DVD when it’s all done.

Lots of stuff happening with gaming. John started running a game and plans on continuing it for at least a few sessions. He also is planning another one for the future which is sweet. Tuck is working up his Earthdawn game which I am looking forward to. I have the current Shadowrun game going and a Serenity game that we started. I also have been putting some time into the space game I am setting up. I managed to find someone to do some art for it to help get pictures in peoples’ minds. A big thanks to them for that. I have a good chunk of work ahead of me, but with the current games and the games other people are planning I should have the time for it. I am going to plan for SR heavy this weekend and probably take the next week off. If I get a solid two sessions planned up I should be good for the break. I have two or three weeks to tie up one storyline before one player moves away. Tim will be leaving sometime this month to live in another part of the state with his new wife. We talked and he wanted to be around to finish up some of the story. I wish him the best in his new life. We may even get some posts on Throw out the Dice about him finding a new group.

I preordered Star Trek Online and snagged a beta key for it. I’m looking forward to trying it out when the servers come up on the 12th. Seems pretty slick, but I can’t say until I play it. I’ll just have to stick with Runescape until then. I suppose I have lots of work to do for Shadowrun on Monday. Best get to it.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/its-ok-ill-live-to-fight-another-day/feed/0Life goes onhttp://thirdshifthero.com/50/
http://thirdshifthero.com/50/#respondMon, 04 Jan 2010 10:00:35 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=50[...]]]>I feel like I have been away form this for months when in reality is has been something like 2 days. I blame all the new years crap and the extra work involved with that.

My good fiend, Tim, just got married on the 2nd. It was a pretty exciting day for him and I want to wish him the best in his new life. If you don’t see some post on Throw out the Dice from him give the guy a break. He deserves the time to be with his new wife. Me on the other hand, I am just lzy and forgetful.

I should talk about that a bit. I don’t pre-write my articles like Tim does. I write and post whatever is on my mind that night. Because we have not been gaming for the last few weeks due to holidays and marriage and such I have not had much on my mind. This in turn leads me to staring blankly at a computer screen until I give up. I should be all smart and get a backlog of articles, but that is just not me I guess.

We are starting gaming back up which is pretty sweet. Don’t know what we are going to do, but it should be fun. With Tim leaving I have to pick up the GM slack that has been left. Tuck has stepped up and agreed to run some games and I’m hoping I can con others into doing it as well. I don’t know about everyone else, but I like lots of different things going on. I like different games and settings. It keeps me interested. I also just ordered the core book for Ironclaw which should be interesting. Looks like a fun system and all, but getting people to play it may be tough.

Victory is mine for the time being. I managed to get Xubuntu 8.04 running on that old laptop. Now I just need to get the wireless card working. It’s an old Proxim silver card and finding the stuff to get it going has been tough. I have seen a few ways to possibly do it but all of them are pretty in depth. I home I am just missing something easy. I may set that project aside and work on throwing together a crappy print server for my parents. That could be tragic.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/50/feed/0Hiring(kinda) and morehttp://thirdshifthero.com/hiringkinda-and-more/
http://thirdshifthero.com/hiringkinda-and-more/#commentsSat, 02 Jan 2010 05:32:14 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=45[...]]]>First off, I am looking for a few people for various things.

We are trying to fill a couple spots in our gaming group. We play at 6pm to 10pmish on Saturdays and Mondays. You don’t need to go to both days. If you want to check it out let me know. We usually play Shadowrun, Serenity, D&D, and will be starting a bunch of new systems including Earthdawn, d20 modern/future and various others. If you are new to gaming or haven’t done it in awhile that is fine. We are more than willing to teach others and help get people into the hobby. Just get in touch with me through email/twitter/facebook/comments/etc.

Also, I am looking for an artist to help me out. I don’t care what style or anything I just have zero artistic ability and am looking for someone who has ability to help me create some game material visually. I can’t pay you anything, but if you can come chill with me at my place I’ll share some beer with you. Also if you have an online presence I will pimp your shit the best I can. I do lots of different stuff from fantasy/medieval to modern to sci-fi. I would guess a good portion would be objects and scenes, maybe some character drawing. Anything I can get basically. Interested at all reach me through the same methods as above.

If you have any friends that would fit either of those categories let me know. Thanks.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/hiringkinda-and-more/feed/1All the world is madhttp://thirdshifthero.com/all-the-world-is-mad/
http://thirdshifthero.com/all-the-world-is-mad/#respondMon, 28 Dec 2009 07:09:35 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=42[...]]]>I never thought I would but I have been really looking at upgrades for my airsoft gun like crazy. After my brother got a M203 and some nice red dot sights and agreed to sell them to me I have been going crazy. I ordered a whole new vest setup and will be getting more parts for it when Tactical Tailor responds to my questions. I probably won’t be able to play for a few more months so now is a good time to get geared up I figure. Once I get all of my mods done (well I buy the parts my brother does it) I’ll post some sexy pictures of the finished product. I’m pretty stoked for it.

I am still messing with that damn old ass Sony Vaio or whatever the hell it is. I can’t seem to get the system to load properly. I am thinking GRUB is not installing right. I’ll try reinstalling that over my three days off. That little thing is a bastard. I have a copy of Ubuntu Warty I think I could just load on there. I don’t know if I can update to Karmic from there though. I should just try to reinstall the command line system. Once I get that fired up I should be able to get the Xubuntu desktop with apt. I have done that before so it doesn’t scare me.

My parents need a print server and being the cheap bastard that I am I have decided to try and turn one of my old ass junk computers into an print server. I have a feeling that this will not work well, but that won’t stop me. It seems I have to fail to learn. Eventually I will break down and buy one of those tiny commercial print servers. I should finish one project at a time though first. Laptop then print server. Too much shit laying around as it is.

Been playing Runescape like a beast. I finished the quest Underground Pass last night which opens up a big time quest as soon as I get a couple more skill points. Should be ready for it in a couple days. I’m pretty excited for it. I won’t be a total noob anymore.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/all-the-world-is-mad/feed/0Something from nothinghttp://thirdshifthero.com/something-from-nothing/
http://thirdshifthero.com/something-from-nothing/#respondFri, 25 Dec 2009 08:30:31 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=40[...]]]>Working on Christmas is kind of nice. It’s a slow easy and and no one expects much from you because you are working on a holiday. I just hope I won’t have to do a double or more with the damn blizzard going on. I guess it’s extra cash if I get stuck with it.

Visited my parents today and something really clicked in my head. About a year or so ago my dad quit his (really well paying) job to work at his church for about what I make (about 1/3 what he used to make). He hated his old job and loves the new one. He coordinates volunteer services for the church and leads studies and such. My mother got a job at a group home , and she loves her job and the clients she works with. Now, my questions is were did I go wrong? I get no joy from helping people. I don’t care much about other peoples misfortune and prefer to ignore them or avoid them. I know this is a typical attitude, but you think I would have picked it up somewhere. It bothers me somewhat now. I doubt I will change, but now I am aware of this fact. I don’t even really feel bad about it. I guess we all don’t have gifts like that. I’m glad they are doing it so I don’t have to.

Nothing else to say. Bored as hell right now and I could use a nap. May be a long night.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/something-from-nothing/feed/0Winding down the nighthttp://thirdshifthero.com/winding-down-the-night/
http://thirdshifthero.com/winding-down-the-night/#respondMon, 21 Dec 2009 11:16:19 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=38[...]]]>Whew I must be getting old because it is getting harder to stay up late. I never though midnights would drag me down like this.

Watched two more episodes of Dollhouse and it is really getting sad that they canceled that show. The plot is getting really cool and stuff is really happening. One of the episodes was really creepy. For some reason it reminded me of the episode from Angel season 5 where the crazy ghost guy is after Spike. Freaky shit in my opinion. I think there are only two episodes left to go. Looking forward to the last one it should be epic.

Runescape is my game now it seems. I have been playing pretty hard core lately and managed to advance quite a bit in my short time playing. I never though I would enjoy that game as much as I do now. I’m hoping to make more progress over the next few weeks. It is the perfect game for work because it requires little attention and I can get stuff done while playing it. Plus it runs good on the netbook.

A friend of mine recently gave me a ooooooooooooooooooold (windows 95 era) Sony Vaio notebook. Well, it’s bigger than a notebook. I was hoping to put Ubuntu on it, but I don’t think the versions of Linux I have will run on that processor. It is something like a 240 Mhz Pentium. I may just have to clean up the XP install on it and then turn it into a wall hanging. At least it’s no loss if I break it. It’s outdated and I got it for free.

Writing for Shadowrun is getting tough right now. I have been planning the arcs and know the story, but I almost feel there need to be a few more stepping stones thrown in before the next part of the story comes up. Maybe I am just over thinking it. I like how things have gone so far. The group is looking good, and they are finding their roles very well. Individual skills and personalities are really coming out and being used. I think encouraging a bit more player interaction would be good though. There will be situations for that soon. I have really been turning the final encounter over in my head a lot. I have been planning it for some time, but I don’t want the whole event to be too complex, yet I want it to be a challenge and give everyone an opportunity to use their skills. I’ll keep working on it for now. There is a bit of time before this goes down. I also don’t know which direction they will go first. Either way works I guess.

I’ll polish up a few things when I get breakfast after work. I am craving McD’s breakfast burritos something fierce. mmmmm nummy.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/winding-down-the-night/feed/0Hey I can put titles herehttp://thirdshifthero.com/34/
http://thirdshifthero.com/34/#respondMon, 14 Dec 2009 06:39:37 +0000http://blog.fridgewire.com/?p=34[...]]]>I have recently started playing Runescape again, to feed my video game addiction. I don’t remember enjoying it this much. I played pretty heavy for about 3 years and then left it for WoW. There is something about its simplicity that makes it inviting, but still allows very complex actions and goals. I was talking with my brother about the game recently and I never realized howmany complex events/quests/monsters there were in the game. I have been playing pretty heavy and hope to gain a small amount of ground on him. (I hope he reads this and chuckles.)

On my way to work today I popped in “Exit Stage Right”, a live CD by Rush, into my player and something jumped out at me. I know I have said this before as well. I really think Alex Lifeson doesn’t get enough credit. He is so often overshadowed by Geddy Lee and Neil Peart that nothing gets said about him. I am not saying Lee and Peart are bad musicians, I would have to be completely insane or retarded to say that. I just think Lifeson is better than most people give him credit for. The styles he uses are so flowing and melodic that they really stick in my head. I still love the solo of his on “Limelight”. It has a haunting sound to it that really gives the song a strange feeling of loneliness. I guess it really jumped out today for me.

Have two episodes of Dollhouse to watch. I’m looking forward to it. The show really picked up… after the canceled it. Oh well I can enjoy the remainder of it.

EDIT: Forgot a title. Still getting used to WordPress

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/34/feed/0Here I am againhttp://thirdshifthero.com/here-i-am-again/
http://thirdshifthero.com/here-i-am-again/#respondTue, 08 Dec 2009 09:55:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=32[...]]]>If you are reading this you have found my new blog location. As I said on my Blogger account, I have switched to using my own domain and WordPress to host the blog now. Hopefully this will be a better system in the end. It looks nicer at least. I have more control over lots of the back end stuff and can mess with my layout much more. As I said I probably will break parts of this so bear with me. This is a test and there may be issues. Please let me know if you have any problems so I can look into fixing them.

If you get a chance take a look at the rest of the Fridgewire site and help me fix up any issues that crop up. There will be lots of optimizing and editing things now that this is up here. I may take a stab at making the main Fridgewire page use a similar template to the blog. We shall see what the future holds.

I am planning on starting up a new project for our gaming group in the near future. We have a few changes coming out way because of RL situations and I may get stuck with a bigger role in keeping our gaming nights alive. Only the future will tell, but I want to be ready. I’m sure I will have something up in a week or so about it. For now enjoy the site and take it easy.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/here-i-am-again/feed/0long long timehttp://thirdshifthero.com/long-long-time/
http://thirdshifthero.com/long-long-time/#respondSun, 06 Dec 2009 07:53:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=30[...]]]>Wow It has been awhile since I posted here. Last week was a down week so I didn’t post anything. Almost feels like my life was on hold for a week or so. A busy week at work didn’t help at all. I’m chowing down lunch right now so I managed to get another post up. I realized a few days ago, when I found the cafeteria had new vending machine, how much I love Nesquik strawberry milk. I’m sure that makes me like 6 years old or something, but it is really damn good. I’m super glad it is here now. I’ll get sick of it in a few weeks I’m sure.

Watched the two new Dollhouse episodes on Hulu. Holy hell were they good. I am really enjoying the show and it’s sad they are canceling it. It isn’t Firefly by any means, but I am glad it exists. Plus it has Alexis Densiof and Summer Glau. What’s not to love about that. Seriously.

I finally got sick of AT&T and Apple’s general douchery and switched carriers and got a HTC Hero. I really really dig it. I know Google controls another portion of my life, but I can live with that. It isn’t as fast as the iPhone, but the ability to customize it and access what I want makes up for it. The app store need a little more time to mature, but they are good apps overall. I did prefer the email interface on the iPhone and the multitouch browser zoom, which hopefully gets into the Android 2.1 update soon. I still basically would love the iPhone hardware with Android running on it. I can’t have everything though. I really dig it so far and that little android mascot is fucking adorable!

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/long-long-time/feed/0Ain’t nobody taking me outhttp://thirdshifthero.com/aint-nobody-taking-me-out/
http://thirdshifthero.com/aint-nobody-taking-me-out/#respondSun, 22 Nov 2009 08:11:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=29[...]]]>I have been rather lazy with my posting and writing lately. I took a week off from posting on Throw Out the Dice last week and we decided to take a week off from Shadowrun and the D&D game before that. It was nice to not have to think so much for the week. Unfortunately I also haven’t been writing on my own projects much. I am hoping to pick those back up soon.

I did not completely forgo all of my little projects though. I have been reconfigureing a few computers at my house to test some server stuffs. I would like to eventually get a domain supported in my house, mostly just for the hell of it. I managed to get a DHCP server working, but that was just a test and moved that back to my router. My next goal is an internal DNS server. I hope it isn’t too scary. I have also been starting up some virtualization to test networking that with my server. In the end I am virtualize a few servers on one box. Dunno how well that works out though.

I have been thinking quite a bit about some aspect of TOtD and probably with run some things by Tim soonish. I would really like to discuss things with other people, so maybe a forum is in order. I don’t know how well that sits with Tim though and there are issues tied to that that need to be looked at. Also getting some word out would be good. Mostly it is just for our gaming group, but a little more exposure may not be a bad thing. I think it’s more brain musing than it is a realistic plan, but we will see.

I’m getting close to the end of my hosting plan. Still don’t know if I want to keep it or not. I really don’t have a use for it right now. Maybe in the future I will pick one up again, but I think as of now I will let it expire. I still have the domain for a year at least.

Oh, if anyone knows of a good deal on a server box let me know. Even if it is older and used that would be cool. I just want something to try stuff out on. I would just need all the hardware essentially. I could replace HDDs also if they were not included.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/aint-nobody-taking-me-out/feed/0The Night is driving me madhttp://thirdshifthero.com/the-night-is-driving-me-mad/
http://thirdshifthero.com/the-night-is-driving-me-mad/#respondMon, 16 Nov 2009 07:38:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=28[...]]]>The days are getting too short and not seeing the sun for a few days is really starting to mess with my head. It is going to be a long winter if it’s already starting now. I just hope it is better than it was a few years ago. I was tripping out pretty bad. I think not seeing the sun started messing with my head so I had crazy dreams. Then I wouldn’t go to sleep because I was so freaked out then when I finally did sleep I had insane dreams because I was so tired. It was bad. I think I will cope better now. At least I hope I do.

I am debating renewing my hosting plan and keeping my domain around for a bit longer. I am going to test a few other things with it and see what I can do. I plan on seeing if I can toss up a vent server, and I will try loading a forum system onto it. I may actually use it for something constructive in the future, but that is still very much in the air. I need something to put on it first and I don’t have much for that.

Anyone who reads this should let me know what their Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, or gdgt user name is so I can add them. I am sad and friendless so make me happy. And If you don’t have and account for at least the first three go get one so you can add me. Or i will cry.

Time to figure out what I am going to write about for Throw Out The Dice. As always I plan ahead and am prepared.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/the-night-is-driving-me-mad/feed/0Veteran ‘s Dayhttp://thirdshifthero.com/veteran-s-day/
http://thirdshifthero.com/veteran-s-day/#respondWed, 11 Nov 2009 22:48:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=27[...]]]>I like I have to say something today. I have a huge respect for our troops and what they sacrifice to keep our country safe. Regardless of the political nature of our conflicts these people are willing to keep us free. They sacrifice much to give us that. I just want to say thank you to all the veterans out there, who have served in times of conflict or peace. You are all true American heros.
]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/veteran-s-day/feed/0Back on track in the brainhttp://thirdshifthero.com/back-on-track-in-the-brain/
http://thirdshifthero.com/back-on-track-in-the-brain/#respondMon, 09 Nov 2009 05:41:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=26[...]]]>I think my brain finally got it’s act together from last night. I was really out of it for some reason. It all passes though.

I finished Watership Down yesterday and man was that book EPIC! I loved the whole thing and was sad when it ended. The story was great, the character development was amazing, and the climax pulled you in and wouldn’t let go. Plus all the mythology weaved into the story made me really enjoy it. Lots of little things that made me love it (like rabbits not being able to count to five). I swear I will uses the word “Hrududu” as often as possible, because seriosuly, it is awesome. It makes me want to play some Bunnies & Burrows hardcore.

I pick up a trilogy of Shadowrun books by Jak Koke that are a little old, but I am excited for it anyways. It is The Dragon Heart Saga and deals with Dunkelzahn’s assassination and the return of the horrors I believe, which is a slight Earthdawn crossover and makes me wet my nerd-pants. Looking forward to it. I read Liferock, which Koke wrote, and liked that a lot. I have faith the trilogy will be awesome.

I kinda feel like a failure. Wordman, a big figure in the Shadowrun community, is selling all his books on ebay and I bid on them. There are still 5 days left, but as of now I have the high bid. I kinda hope I get it and kinda hope I get outbid. It is a crap load of stuff, and I would be dropping a crap load of cash for it. We shall see what the future hold. With my insane impuls buying currently who knows what will happen.

For some reason I have been writing quite a bit lately. I have been working on what I would consider a series of short fiction pieces dealing with Anze after the adventure we finished. I feel like I should be working on more stuff for the DDH, but I think I can wait until the first issue comes out. Plus, I prefer Anze in Saratta over my SR incarnation of her. The SR version is way to bitter and doesn’t seem to have the love that the other does. I really like what is happening in the current writing though. I will probably have to bother Tuck to look at it and tell me if it sucks bad. Meh, in any case I will probably keep going even if it sucks because I enjoy it.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/back-on-track-in-the-brain/feed/0Huh…http://thirdshifthero.com/huh/
http://thirdshifthero.com/huh/#respondSun, 08 Nov 2009 09:06:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=25Wow… I have absolutely nothing to say today. Maybe there will be something on my brain tomorrow.
]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/huh/feed/0You sick people….http://thirdshifthero.com/you-sick-people/
http://thirdshifthero.com/you-sick-people/#respondMon, 02 Nov 2009 10:38:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=24[...]]]>I have decided that anyone who works with HTML and CSS for fun hates themselves. I picked up a hosting/domain package for a month and have been trying my hand at some site building and such. Mostly want to mess with the domain stuff and getting things working with that. This blog is actually also there now. I may forward it in the future to test it out, but right now I don’t want to break too much. I suppose I should mention it is Fridgewire.com

Just so you are aware, I am terrible with HTML/CSS/etc. The code isn’t scary I just have no feel for design and I get sick of repetitive tasks. Tables make me want to hurt myself. It’s easier to use a template or another page and just mod the hell out of it. I can do that with most things. I just hate building from the ground up.

Gonna be a busy day today. Airsoft at noon, SR at 6pm. Some fun stuff happening in the SR game and should be a good time. Can’t wait to see what happens. It could be epic or tragic, both are very likely. There is still lots left to this game and it almost feels overwhelming. I have two big story lines and a few small ones dangling out there. I suppose it still is pretty early on. I have been trying to get Tuck to run an intermediate game when this one finishes or if we need to take a break. Maybe Serenity would be a good one. I like that system. I have been brainstorming throwing together a homebrew system. It would take influence from a lot of places and I would try to make it pretty lightweight. I would like it to have an action point system for initiative though and that is not nessisarily light weight by nature. Just brainstorming it right now, but maybe it will come together. Random thought, I should push Tuck to start working on the Quest for Glory based ED game. That sounds like shitloads of fun. Time to get stuff done, I’m out.

EDIT: Apparently the blog is already hosted on Fridgewire. It’s working so that is good at least.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/you-sick-people/feed/0Into the hurricanehttp://thirdshifthero.com/into-the-hurricane/
http://thirdshifthero.com/into-the-hurricane/#commentsSun, 01 Nov 2009 05:21:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=23[...]]]>So I get to work an extra hour because of DST. I’m sure more third shifters out there feel my pain. At least we get the our off later in the year (maybe).

Borderlands is pretty damn sweet. Me and Dan have been rocking it pretty hard and I love it. Also rolling with Windows 7 on my main computer and I love it. Much better than Vista in my opinion. Lots of little things that make it great. I actually seems like Microsoft listened to users. I’m a fan so far. Also updated my Ubuntu distro to “Karmic Koala” or 9.10 for all you people you are not into naming your OS after animals. Haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. I should use Linux more.

Ran a Shadowrun game today for fun. Had everyone roll up gang characters who really can’t do shit. Everyone seemed to have fun and had a good bar fight. I kinda used the game to try some different stuff. Going to keep it open as a filler game. Even though the game went really well I’m starting to feel a disconnect somewhere with gaming as a whole. I’m not quitting or anything it’s just that something doesn’t seem right. I had a long conversation with a friend about some things a few days ago and it kind of showed me how I relate to game worlds and characters. I think I am missing a beat with my normal game group somewhere. I know I have always been the kind of person who could go through the whole game without rolling dice, and most of the other are not of that mindset. I need to pull my brain back in somehow I just don’t know how. I should be easy on them considering I have been playing for years and most of them have just started (basically) and some are in the “dungeon crawl phase” of gaming. It just seems like there is more of a focus on “The guy = exp” and not on building a story with characters that have goals and feelings. I will admit some of the interactions are great. In my SR game the characters meet frequently at a restaurant chain called “The Hearthstone” (think Perkins) to chat about missions and everything else. I can imagine them there drinking coffee and talking the whole time. For some reason that is one of my favorite things. I like watching the characters build friendships or rivalries. In the previous game the whole purpose for us to continue our adventure was to save one of our friends who we actually cared about. Even though the real threat was essentially the end of the world we didn’t give a shit about that. We wanted out friend back. I’m not saying the SR should be completely like that and the world is a little darker. I just think a human aspect is missing from it. Maybe it’s all in my brain, but I suppose I should practice what I preach and do some talking to see where I sit and they sit. I don’t think people should change, but knowing where they sit will help me accommodate them in my play. Perceptions need to at least be somewhat in line or there can be issues. I just need to check all the perceptions. Wow that was a rambling mess.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/into-the-hurricane/feed/1Way too much time on my handshttp://thirdshifthero.com/way-too-much-time-on-my-hands/
http://thirdshifthero.com/way-too-much-time-on-my-hands/#respondMon, 26 Oct 2009 05:15:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=22[...]]]>Man ever since I quit playing WoW I have been doing a lot more stuff. Not necessarily useful things, but more in general. I’ve also been spending tons of money also on lots of random shit. I’m kinda nervous to start another MMO at all. As long I stay out of the raid scene I should be solid. Of course I am getting Borderlands today which could suck some amount of life from me. Should be a good time.

I have been tossing around the idea of starting up another fiction blog. I enjoyed the short life of my WoW RP blog, but that went away with WoW. I don’t know if I really wanna stick it up on a blog is my big thing. I mostly write for myself and don’t worry about an audience at all (no that there would be one anyways). I find it relaxing and fun. It goes along with how I like to make characters and create stories. I used to really worry about it until I realized that it didn’t matter as long as I enjoyed it and that really opened the door for me. I kinda went through the same thing with gaming. I didn’t want to admit it to anyone that I did it until I finally overcame that and realized it is part of what I am and if they don’t like it then fuck ’em. I realize my writing is not good and only appeals to me, but that is the goal. I guess I don’t know who it appeals to, but I know I like very different things than most people. If I did boot this up it would be based in Saratta for sure, and I don’t know if I would write about Anze between the two campaigns or make a new character to write about. I have been writing heavily about Anze and have a good grasp on her so I feel comfortable writing about her. A new character would open up some new possibilities. I would not have the interactions of other people though which would be good and bad.

I’ll have to poll some people and see what they think. I know most people won’t give a shit, but feedback would be good. In the more immediate future I gotta polish off the Shadowrun game for Monday. Now that I am not ill it should be miles better. I just hope I don’t make it too hard or too easy. There is a fine balance I need to hit here and I need to watch out for it. I’ll just have to do my best.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/way-too-much-time-on-my-hands/feed/0It kinda makes me sadhttp://thirdshifthero.com/it-kinda-makes-me-sad/
http://thirdshifthero.com/it-kinda-makes-me-sad/#respondSun, 25 Oct 2009 07:41:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=21[...]]]>I just finished watching the last episode of Dollhouse and holy shit was it good. I pretty much have been expecting the show to be canceled and I know it is ending this season, but this actually makes me feel bad about it. Some good stuff finally rolls around and the end is so near. Brings a tear to my eye.

I’m patiently waiting for my copy of Windows 7 to arrive. I am pretty stoked to get that shit rolling on my computer. I didn’t really get a chance to drive into the guts of it when I had the RC. I really want to see how it performs under continual use. I like the bit I worked with it, but that doesn’t tell how it will work being my main OS. I have heard good things so I have faith.

I should be getting my copy of Borderlands soon and I am pretty excited for that game. Not as excited as I am for MW2, but that really isn’t a fair comparison. Borderlands still looks sweet and I think I will get a good amount of play out of it. Saw some game play footage for it and that made me more excited. It actually uses iron sights, which is a huge plus for me. I love iron sight aiming on games. It just makes everything feel good. I’ll probably shout about it after I play it a bit. We shall see in the upcoming days.

The first issue of DDH isn’t out yet due to more technical issues. I’ll keep the faith and hope for the best with it. I saw some of the artwork and it looks shiny. If this comes together alright it will look great. I’ll keep my fingers crossed right now.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/it-kinda-makes-me-sad/feed/0I like to liehttp://thirdshifthero.com/i-like-to-lie/
http://thirdshifthero.com/i-like-to-lie/#commentsWed, 21 Oct 2009 01:22:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=20[...]]]>So I thought I was getting better, but alas the viruses heard me and I got worse the next day. Hopefully I am recovering now. A quick thanks to everyone on Monday for dealing with me. The Shadowrun game was short and pretty lame due to my illness so I didn’t get a chance to prepare and was exhausted/stoned out of my brain from cold meds.

I have been playing GTA4 for some time now on PC. I played it on X-Box for awhile, but then one of my room mates douchey friends had it stolen when he borrowed it from us. So, I never got to finish it there. In any case I am playing again and holy hell it that game sweet. Anyone who does not thing video games are a legitimate form of adult entertainment (not that adult entertainment you perv), needs to play this game (and Bioshock, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and many others). This game really has a cool story, memorable characters, and hits some really solid social topics. The discussions about the American dream, moral standards, and living in a tough word really make the characters seem like real people. You can relate to most of them in some way. Even the main character, who seems like a total hard ass killer, has goals and desires that we can relate too. I know that game-play-wise the hanging out with friends thing got annoying, but I eventually enjoyed doing things with them because they would share their views on life, their family, their job, or anything else that was normally mundane. There are some incidents in the game where you need to pick between two characters and kill one of them. I found myself looking through the cross hairs at both of them not able to decide for a long time. I found myself thinking “If I pick this guy he can help me get by better possibly, but he is a douche. The other guy is nice to me, but has little to offer in the way of my survival.” I was essentially RPing the main character without knowing it. If any of you out there are scoffing at the RP you probably wanna go read another blog and possibly go fuck yourself. If you can relate then you can understand how this game can pull you in. I really enjoy games like that. I think that is because I am a role-player. Just some observations.

I was looking at the Nook today and I want one. Ever since I heard about ebook readers I have wanted one that will take my PDFs and let me read them. This would be super handy for gaming, or writing games away from all my books. I do lots of my game writing on my netbook and it’s tough to flip between my word processing and the multiple PDFs I have home. Those little things aren’t meant to take that kind of load. I gotta do some more research, but if this has what I want I may pick that thing up. It looks tasty too. If B&N set up something to give you a free or reduced PDF copy of a book if you owned it that would be some epic shit. Hell if they gave like 25% off if you brought the book in that would make it worth it for me. Maybe I’ll pick one up when they come out. I may have to go put my hands on the Nook at their stores.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/i-like-to-lie/feed/1On the road to recoveryhttp://thirdshifthero.com/on-the-road-to-recovery/
http://thirdshifthero.com/on-the-road-to-recovery/#respondSun, 18 Oct 2009 06:27:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=19[...]]]>I got sick a couple days ago with something, I dunno if it is a cold or flu or whatever, but it’s is working it’s way out of my system and I’m finally doing better. I’m gonna blame the flu shot I got the day before I got sick on it. Mostly because it is fun and probably not the reason.

I finally have become a huge fag. I picked up a twitter account a day or so ago. I told myself I never would, but Moblin has twitter feeds integrated into it so I though I would pull it up. I suck really bad. I also snagged a last.fm account which seems pretty slick. Anyone who reads this and has an account (and even if you don’t they are both free,so… srsly) should click on the fun little links on the side and follow me on both of those. My facebook is over that way too, so if I know you and are not my friend on it toss me a request. Do not under any circumstance send me gifts for any of your dumb fucking games though. I’ll accept mob invites for Mobsters 2 or neighbor request for Farm Town, but I do not play either of them so don’t expect any more than that.

My room mate Dan showed me a tactical gear site called Tactical Tailor and holy shit do they have some nice gear. I play airsoft and really dig that stuff so I am looking for a new MOLLE vest and all the fun stuff that I need to put on it. Unfortunately the vests they have on there are really damn expensive (but really nice as well!). I may have to stick to a cheaper one from the no less epic Cheaper Than Dirt. I need to find some pouches that will hold my clamped AR mags well. Most are split pouches, and that may work just fine. The vest I have now is fine just not modular, which I love.

I have been looking at buying a new (real) pistol. I already own a Ruger .45 and a Springfield XD .45 compact. I have been tossing a few ideas around in my head. I have always wanted a 1911, but I already own two .45s and really don’t need another. I have had my eye on a Beretta 92FS also, but am not totally sold on the idea. My last choice was a pocket pistol of some type. That would be considerably less expensive and practical. I’ll have to do some shopping around before I decide I guess.

Music:“The Artist In The Ambulance” by Thrice“Hands So Red On A Face So Pale” by For All Those Sleeping

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/on-the-road-to-recovery/feed/0Never know what to expecthttp://thirdshifthero.com/never-know-what-to-expect/
http://thirdshifthero.com/never-know-what-to-expect/#respondTue, 13 Oct 2009 21:23:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=18[...]]]>It’s funny how life is sometimes. That Shadowrun game I had been working on during the weekend (well… not working on as much as I should have) turned out pretty good. Considering I wrote the whole thing on about ten pages of a small notepad, and very little of what I actually did was floating around in my head instead of being written down. It got me thinking about game preparation. Now, before any of you who play with me assume I sad “Fuck it” to writing my games, just know that I still am doing that. I am actaully talking about a form of preparation.

Before I explain what I mean let explain some other things. I prepare my games like most GMs (I think most at least) where I write out a plot, scratch out some NPCs, throw together some maps, etc etc etc. The quality of this and time spent may vary from session to session, but it is there. For the type of game I am running I need that for of preparation. Do I write on the fly? Oh god yes. I pretty much wrote in two adventure hooks from my on the fly crap. I don’t think that is a bad thing at all, you need that flexibility. You just need to watch out so you don’t write yourself into a corner or do something that doesn’t make sense.

So, the other form of preparation I am talking about is a mental preparation. I know I did this before without realizing it. When running a game you influence the player’s experience by how you act. If you are tired and don’t put much effort into it the players will not be interested. If you are not interested in the story more than likely the players will not be as well. You need to engage yourself and be ready for the game. I had a rough weekend before the game and I knew I was not going to be ready to go at start time. Fortunately, one of the players was late and I opted to hold off until they got there. That gave me time to wake up and energize myself, get my mind into the SR universe before bringing my players into it. I had some good feedback afterward, and initially going into the game I was very worried about it. I guess this is just something to think about beforehand and I will consciously keep doing it to see if it helps. I know as a player I should be doing this as well.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/never-know-what-to-expect/feed/0Apparently Moblin’s don’t like musichttp://thirdshifthero.com/apparently-moblins-dont-like-music/
http://thirdshifthero.com/apparently-moblins-dont-like-music/#respondMon, 12 Oct 2009 07:01:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=17[...]]]>I was getting a little fed up with the slow speed of Ubuntu 9.04 on my netbook so I did some live boot testing to decide between Ubuntu Netbook Remix or Moblin 2.0. I eventually decided to go with an install of Moblin and try something compeltly new. I’ll list off the things I liked about it first. The GUI is really slick and fast, the boot time is almost non-existent, and it has loads of web integration including messengers and thigns like last.fm and twitter. Looked good off the bat. Now I soon found out that finding any type of setting is like trying to convince a nun to dress up like Satan and spank you. You really need to be creative and look for the answer in places that don’t logically make sense. I found out the wifi can also be sketchy, but that was nothign compared to the last. THERE IS NO MP3 CODEC INSTALLED BY DEFAULT! Imagine my surprise when I try to play my music on the integrated media player that comes installed by default and it does not work. So like any good linux user I jump on the repositories and start looking ans lo and behold there are no mp3 codecs at all! Now I have a big huge WTF hanging over my head. After some creative googling I managed to download a codec that worked…. but it was a tar ball and I had to extract it correclty. I have to flex my massive linux terminal muscles, which are atorphied to the point of death because they are never used at all. Well I managed to guess the move command at least after I extraced it (it’s “mv [source] [destination]” in case you were curious.) my beautiful Songbird is singing Three Inches of Blood. I shouldn’t blame them too much. I think there are some liscensing issues with mp3 files or something dumb like that.

This really seems like a linux distro for people who only know how to use cell phone OSs. Even with that I dig it once I ironed out most of the issues. It still needs some work, but it has lots of potential and it slick for UMPCs.

I’m looking at dropping our cable TV and have been working out ways to set up a HTPC. I figure I can get one built for cheapish and actually use linux as an OS. I ran across XBMC while looking for software and made a liveboot disk of it. Holy crap is it sweet. When testing it I only used my laptops remote to get a feel of menu navigation like that. It worked like a charm, even when getting a video off the network. I even watched part of Strange Days over the network from a shared folder from an avi file and it worked great. I read about a hulu plugin for it and after researching that I may go with that. I am stoked for it. Hopefully it worked good after testing unlike Moblin.

Oh yeah.. Shadowrun…. shit……

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/apparently-moblins-dont-like-music/feed/0The Run Aroundhttp://thirdshifthero.com/the-run-around/
http://thirdshifthero.com/the-run-around/#respondSun, 11 Oct 2009 06:13:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=16[...]]]>Man it has been a week. I feel like I need to do a million things, which in reality is probably closer to four. Our house is starting to fall apart it seems. I had another one of the faucets good and I need to replace it. Tim moved a bookshelf we had in front of a heating vent, which was a good call. Heat is a good thing in the (near) winter. My car’s tire decided to give me the metaphoric finger and go flat. I gotta wait until Monday to get it replace. That should work out, I just don’t wanna deal with it.

I feel like I have been writing like crazy lately. I just finished another submission for the Dumpshock Datahaven online magazine, so maybe that will get tossed into one of the future issues. The first one is supposed to come out on Monday. Pretty stoked for it still even though it keeps getting delayed. I really wanna see how the finished product turned out. I have a Shadowrun game to get ready for, and while I have idea none of them are on paper. I have a good bunch of writing to do for that over the next two days.

When I find time I have been writing for the Saratta Wiki. I need to go through and do some editing on a few articles. That work has been on my back burner lately with the DDH issue 2 deadline (today) and the SR game (Monday) and the post for Throw out the Dice.

We did a revolving GM game today with everyone and I think the experiment as a whole worked out pretty good. We each took 30min to an hour and cycled through running a game. Was a good time and the post game chat was awesome. I will probably touch on some of that in Throw out the Dice so I’ll save it for there. I gotta go pound out the SR stuff so I gotta call it for now.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/the-run-around/feed/0I love to forget titleshttp://thirdshifthero.com/i-love-to-forget-titles/
http://thirdshifthero.com/i-love-to-forget-titles/#respondMon, 05 Oct 2009 08:03:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=15[...]]]>So the first issue of DDH is supposed to come out sometime today. I was hoping it would be soon, but alas this is not true. I’m sure I’ll have a post up with a link when it comes out. Super stoked to see the finished product.

Another shameless plug, even though if you read this chances are you already know about it. Me and Tim have a blog about running tabletop RPGs. Check it out at Throw out the Dice.

I’m digging Dollhouse quite a bit. I’m sure it is gonna be canceled soon, and the only reason it isn’t right now is that it is a weekend and no one is at work. Still, I think it gives some really tangible thoughts on the whole trans-human ideas that people may face. I got a bit of that out of Bladerunner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also. Mostly the question of human identity. I’m sure this has all been talked about before, but I really don’t care. I am curious how human identity will change as we let go of our bodies as an identity. Much of what we think is tied to that identity and once we lose that will be find a new identity? If you have a more mental identity how will people relate to that. I suppose hot, shallow people will have a tough time then. Maybe that is just my nerd hopes.

I saw a picture of an airsoft Ares Predator and I really really want one. I know it was a custom gun and all, but I would pay rediculous sums of money for one. It would have to be a blow back version though. Man a real one would be even better. Hiring gunsmith to make one, seriously. Too bad I could never afford that. I just gotta convince my bro to make me an Ares Alpha. If you don’t know what those are they are guns from Shadowrun. Google it.

I’m still planning out some of the big things for the Shadowrun game as well. I need to get it on paper before I lose it. It is coming together in my mind at least. I would like to work on the space game a bit, but I need to focus. I’ll just keep bouncing ideas off people for a bit and see what they want out of it. I’ll wrap it up and get bakc to refreshing the DDH page waiting for the issue to come out.

Edit: now I don’t forget titles. I forget links.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/i-love-to-forget-titles/feed/0http://thirdshifthero.com/14/
http://thirdshifthero.com/14/#respondTue, 29 Sep 2009 22:27:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=14[...]]]>Last night I finally pounded through Bladerunner and I must say it was not as good as I hoped. Aesthetically it was super sweet and oozed cyberpunk out of every possible place. I found it somewhat disjointed and hard to follow. Plus the ending was not as good as the book by far, and I don’t think the book made a big deal about the four year lifespan part. I think the book played more towards the identity part. I really enjoyed the “I think therefore I am” reference by one of the androids. I wonder what Descartes would think about that.

I put another hard drive in my computer recently and have been installing games like a crazy person. I picked up UFO: Aftershock after a long break and forgot how much I fuggin’ love that game. I only have a few issues with it, the primary one being it’s buggy nature, but they are tolerable in my opinion. It makes me wish they would redo the graphics, scrap the current geoscape and replace it one styled after the old X-Com games and release it under that title. Seriously, X-com was epic. I played Terror from the Deep like mad and loved it to death. Apocalypse was… well… It was lots of good ideas that were poorly presented and implemented in my humble opinion. I would go crazy for a new X-Com game. Take the geoscape setup from UFO and TftD, updated a bit obviously, packaged with the real time environment of Aftershock and some minor tweaking to the diplomacy. I could die a happy man then. I dig the squad setup from Aftershock and the weapon composition and training systems are pretty sweet too. I should give Afterlight another shot. Never could really get into it for some reason.

I’ll just throw this out there too. Me and Tim are starting up a quick blog to share some of what we have learned over time about running RPGs. So, if you ever wanna see what goes through our heads or the things we have learned over time head on over and check out Throw Out The Dice. We should have some content posts pretty dang soon. So check it out soon.

If you like Earthdawn, fantasy, power metal, or are not a huge tool you should go check out Logar’s Diary. They are a power metal band from Germany that sings about Earthdawn. Their stuff is a couple years old it’s still epic.

EDIT: OMFG while snagging the link to wikipedia for the x-com entry I found an X-Com board game and pretty much pooped my pants. I am way to excited about this.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/14/feed/0Busy day, slow nighthttp://thirdshifthero.com/busy-day-slow-night/
http://thirdshifthero.com/busy-day-slow-night/#respondSun, 27 Sep 2009 09:50:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=13[...]]]>Some nights just drag on and on. I wish I could be done already. I could use breakfast.

Saturday is usually gaming day and our normal GM was gone today so I printed off an old 2nd ed. D&D Ravenloft adventure and it was sweet. I forgot how much fun Ravenloft was. It is just…. creepy. Even with converting 2nd edition to 3.5 on the fly it went rather well for absolutely no preparation and not even reading through the adventure. I was expecting a one shot but I guess this will stick around for two or three sessions.

One of the guys in the group started playing Halo:ODST at my place………Quick Sidebar: ODST is my room mate’s game. I actually LOATH the Halo franchise and the dumbed down, uninteresting game that has become hugely popular among college aged douches. It is not a bad game in itself it is just so incredibly un-inventive and mediocre that I cannot stand the hype. ODST is slightly better in that regard [End Rant]………. and he mentioned doing a Halo-esque space game would be sweet. Well, I went ripshit crazy with that and have been writing up the game since. I am really excited for it in many ways, even if I decided on d20 Modern for the system. I will have to start plotting and scheming.

I managed to grab a digital copy of 2nd edition Bunnies and Burrows and that game looks damn sweet. It really resembles old school D&D and the book is horrible put together, but I wanna try it. Actually as a result of finding the book my brother convinced me to read Watership Down, and by convinced I mean said something along the lines of “That book was sweet”. The half-priced bookstore I found close to our house actually had a copy I snagged, along with a bunch of Shadowrun novels. To bad I read really really damn slow.

I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? awhile back and decided to watch Bladerunner after I finished the book. I started it tonight, but didn’t get very far, like a third through. Maybe it was the netbook and the volume variations being so crazy. One second I couldn’t hear it the next it was blowing my ears out. Also it was very very dark, which is cool, but tough to see on a small screen in a bright room while trying to work sometimes.I’ll just have to watch it at home.

Watched Dollhouse season 2 episode 1 on Hulu tonight. I’m pretty stoked for it. I really dig the whole Dr. Saunders story line thing. I won’t shoot my mouth of too much, but it is epic and will end up tragic. Of course we already know the “end” kinda from Epitaph. Looking forward to the whole thing.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/busy-day-slow-night/feed/0Soon I Will Dream of Electric Sheephttp://thirdshifthero.com/soon-i-will-dream-of-electric-sheep/
http://thirdshifthero.com/soon-i-will-dream-of-electric-sheep/#respondMon, 21 Sep 2009 10:13:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=12[...]]]>Damn, I am tired. Tonight just killed me for some reason. I should be used to this by now. Could be that I had absolutely nothing to do most of the night. I should probably have worked on more Shadowrun stuff, but I can run with what I got. I read a few chapters in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and it’s pretty epic. I just can’t sit and read tonight. When I finish it I will finally have to watch Bladerunner. Yeah, I suck as a cyberpunk fan.

So, this is officially my first post using Linux. I have been using it more and more lately as I figure out how to use the beast. It has some craziness with it, but I am overcoming it.

Speaking of Linux, and therefore for me Ubuntu, I tried installing the netbook remix on my netbook. Now to be honest I used the synaptic package manager to get everything for it over the top of my current install so things were kinda sketchy because of that. I will have to try a live boot with it for a bit. It looks really slick, but almost to…hmm…. mobile phoneish. I tend to have at the least 4-5 open programs and windows at a time and I don’t know how it handles that. A clean install may help a bit. Hell I almost should just get rid of my Windows install on it. Maybe someday when I feel confident with it. I am still sketchy on many of the things.

Dang… I’m tired. I should take a walk.

Music:“Tacoma 1987: When Dreams Come True” by For All Those Sleeping“Distant Early Warning” by Rush

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/soon-i-will-dream-of-electric-sheep/feed/0It took a long time to finally catch uphttp://thirdshifthero.com/it-took-a-long-time-to-finally-catch-up/
http://thirdshifthero.com/it-took-a-long-time-to-finally-catch-up/#respondSun, 20 Sep 2009 04:50:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=11[...]]]>So, I recently started dual booting Ubuntu on my netbook and “laptop”. I really dig it so far. It has been pretty easy to work with so far, considering this is my third shot at it. I actually can do stuff on it and be mostly productive. I absolutly LOVE the workspace concept they use allowing you to have multiple clean desktops to place windows. The software repositories are also convenient, mostly because you don’t have to attempt to actually install something which confuses the hell out of me. I feel like I should be treating installation like windows and putting everything in the “Program Files” folder or something. It took me long enough to find the home folder and understand it let alone anything else. I still have a lot of learning to do and I will be working at it. I also installed Wine and haven’t been able to get that to fire up a program yet. Am I doing something wrong? Too bad no one who uses linux will ever read this blog.

The last session of out current D&D campaign was tonight. Obviously it ran long and I had to cut out before it was done, so I don’t know if we live or die. Makes me sad. I wanna see how it ends. We are doing a “Epilogue” two weeks from now and I’m pretty stoked for that. The GM is going to share his initial plan on the story and all the NPC’s backstories as well as all of us sharing our characters histories and motivations. I really wanna hear some of the characters stories and ideas and what they think about each other. It has been a long game, pushing two years for us, although we did have about a 3-4 month break in there, maybe more. It has been close to… 3 years in our characters lives I think? Long and epic game.

I have been rocking the ebay and amazon lately and I am totally stoked because I finally got Strange Days today. I totally dig that movie very very much. Mostly because I love Shadowrun and this movie explains simsense better than I ever could. Totally epic.

If you dig Shadowrun be watching for the first DDH issue to come out. Your’s truly has a short fiction article in there. It is looking good overall.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/it-took-a-long-time-to-finally-catch-up/feed/0If it bleeds we can kill it… Too bad it’s a robot.http://thirdshifthero.com/if-it-bleeds-we-can-kill-it-too-bad-its-a-robot/
http://thirdshifthero.com/if-it-bleeds-we-can-kill-it-too-bad-its-a-robot/#commentsFri, 11 Sep 2009 01:06:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=10[...]]]>Man this stuff scares the crop out of me. This technology is super epic and can be used in so many fields it’s mind boggling, but serisouly why call it HAL and why name your company Cyberdyne. Now, even with these ominous signs to the coming robot apocalypse I would totally love to have one of these. I mean just look at it!I would love an exoskeleton kinda thing, or power armor. Man I dig power armor. I would do terrible thing to get power armor…. well, ok maybe not. I still want some though.

I am way to excited about shadowrun on Monday. I am giddy some may say. I hope everything goes well and everyone isn’t retarded(including myself). I will probably be talking about it like crazy on here. I have about a thousand game I wanna run/play/build right now, but I have been completely focused on Shadowrun. That is kinda insane for me. The D&D game is getting close to wrapping up also. Probably one of my favorite games I ever played, second maybe to the 2nd ed. Ravenloft game I played few years ago. Awesome characters and role play, tons of world development, and just fun. I am not a big fan of D&D, actually I despise most things about it, but this game has been epic. Props to the DM on this one. I’ve played with him when he first started and since for…. man it must be close to 12 years? We both have come a long way.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/if-it-bleeds-we-can-kill-it-too-bad-its-a-robot/feed/2Deliver Us From Evil, or iTunes at Leasthttp://thirdshifthero.com/deliver-us-from-evil-or-itunes-at-least/
http://thirdshifthero.com/deliver-us-from-evil-or-itunes-at-least/#respondMon, 07 Sep 2009 05:23:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=9[...]]]>Man, August was completely soul destroying at work. Everything seemed to go wrong along with it being busy as heck. I hope it slows down so I can work a normal week.Shadowrun game starts in one week. I am way too excited. It’s like a kid waiting for Christmas to come. I have been looking forward to this for a long long time. Apparently things get done if you get your shit together and work at it. Gonna be a good group of people and hopefully I can deliver on my end. I haven’t ran a game since College probably. I’m thinking 2 years almost. Maybe I’m wrong, but nothing serious since then. I have a ton of ideas for short games and one-shots, but I am focusing all of my energy on Shadowrun for now. Man, I’m stoaked.

So, I listen to lots of music and have an iPhone. Naturally I would use the virus, I mean media player, iTunes. Well, I recently came across a media player called Songbird that is made by the Mozilla team. As you can tell this contains all the necessary ingredients for something to be awesome. Unfortunately, I does not yet support two things I use, iPhone syncing and Simplify Media. Now, I covered the iPhone with a wonderful application called SharePod, which is a great application so check it out and toss the guy a buck. The only thing keeping me hooked into the disgustingness that is iTunes is Simplify Media, which I love. That is how I get all my music on my netbook and I only keep songs I really listen to lots on my iPhone. I don’t know where this is going, but someone please please please write a add on for Simplify Media for Songbird. I will love you forever.

I don’t know what Apple did, but they fucked the iPhone over somewhat. It is a wonderful piece of hardware even with it’s faults. Unfortunately, it is one of the douchiest cell networks, pretty much requires a terrible piece of software, and has a really shifty app store. It’s like sticking a diamond in a pile of crap. You probably will go after it, but obviously get covered in shit in the process. Maybe I’m just really picky, and I will admit I love programs that have add ins and are extensible. That’s just how I roll. I suppose that is why I use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Songbird. I guess that makes me a fan boy, eh?

Listening to:“Silence” by Blindside“Sons of a New Millennium” by Majesty

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/deliver-us-from-evil-or-itunes-at-least/feed/0The Philosophy of Melee Weaponshttp://thirdshifthero.com/the-philosophy-of-melee-weapons/
http://thirdshifthero.com/the-philosophy-of-melee-weapons/#respondWed, 26 Aug 2009 09:37:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=8[...]]]>So, I was sitting around thinking about some of the FPS games I have played over time and something really occurred to me. From when I started playing FPSs with Wolfenstein 3D to the current FPS I have picked up which is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare there seems to have been a huge shift in how melee weapons are used and viewed. In Wolf 3D the only reason you whipped out the knife was if you were completly out of ammo, and that was a very uncommon occurence unless you jsut held down the fire button with the chaingun. It was pretty pointless and only existed so you could function without ammon. It did almost no damage and was worthless. This continued in most of the games I played, Doom and Doom 2 mainly, until about the time I picked up Half-Life. Now the crowbar wasn’t a huge damage weapon, but they introduced it as a utility item. That game was one of the big ones where each weapon was useful in it’s own right. Weapons each had their own niche and that included the melee weapons. Now, this is just the first game I played that heavily made the transition and very well may not have been the first and I am only speaking from my own experiences. The next big jump in my mind came from the “modern FPSs” like the Halo series, CoD4:MW, and other. Melee weapons suddenly became incredibly powerful one-shot-kill weapons that were very very usable. I don’t know where this actually happened, but Halo was the first big one I saw. I just wonder where this transistion happened for sure. So that my my ming rammbling. There ya go.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/the-philosophy-of-melee-weapons/feed/06th World Here We Come!http://thirdshifthero.com/6th-world-here-we-come/
http://thirdshifthero.com/6th-world-here-we-come/#respondTue, 18 Aug 2009 22:19:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=7[...]]]>So, I am a big Shadowrun fan. Probably one of my favorite table tops out there and my favorite world by far. I have this strange fascination with pointing out real world advances that are moving us closer to that world, because I am a nerd.

I wasn’t expecting anyone to try this yet, but apparently someone is proposing an arcology in New Orleans. That is pretty damn epic, in a scary way. And what is with all arcologies being shaped like pyramids? I don’t really get it, but I guess there probably is a reason.

I have been sleeping terribly for the last few days and it’s killing me. I don’t know why either. I just can’t fall asleep at all. I think it is makeing me ill and I’m not liking it one bit. Maybe it will shape up with any luck.

Music:“The Adventure” by Angels & Airwaves“Broken Lungs” by Thrice

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/6th-world-here-we-come/feed/0Time to slow it downhttp://thirdshifthero.com/time-to-slow-it-down/
http://thirdshifthero.com/time-to-slow-it-down/#respondMon, 17 Aug 2009 05:50:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=6[...]]]>Man, some weeks are just a kick in the balls. Between work being crazy with overtime, upgrades, system failures and such and just dealing with life I am exhausted. After our airsoft skirmishes I crashed super hard and slept for 4 hours on a couch. It was pretty sad. Hopefully after the weekend the insanity will die down for a bit. I have lots to do around the house still.

Finally a glimmer of hope for getting the Shadowrun game started. I have been looking forward to something not D&D for some time. Its good and all I just like switching it up a bit every once in awhile. I like modern/future much better. I was looking through the core book for Mage and World of Darkness and kinda thought about doing a quick game with that. May take a bit of writing though. It would be sweet to get some other games besides D&D running. Maybe I’m just a D&D hater which could be true. I should snag that Rifts book and look at that… I was checking out some of the Gencon stuff by the guys at Fear the Boot and I totally wanna nab some Battletech books and give that a try. Looks really numbery and a good time. I also watched the interview with Catalyst for their new game Eclipse Phase. Sounds epic may look at that. Suppose I should get around to some work.

Music:“YYZ” by Rush“Wolfpack” by Sabaton

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/time-to-slow-it-down/feed/0The day war changedhttp://thirdshifthero.com/the-day-war-changed/
http://thirdshifthero.com/the-day-war-changed/#respondThu, 06 Aug 2009 21:48:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=5[...]]]>So, I was reading one of my gadget blogs and saw that today is the 64th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan. I find modern warfare very interesting and this event, as terrible as it was, shaped the world and out view of war forever. I was sort of the dawn of a new era of weapons that could potentially destroy the entire human race. After that day the fear of nuclear warfare became a very real threat to mankind.

I always thought of WWII as the first “modern war”, as many other have, but never really placed this event as part of that description. I usually attributed it to the heavy use of aircraft, urban combat, the first focused attack on civilian targets, and a war against genocide. But, atomic weapons have been the focus of wars and political debate for decades since. Iraq was almost completely about these types of weapons, the Cold War revolved around nuclear stockpiling and strategic missile placement, and current situations with North Korea have to do with nuclear technology as well. WWII pretty much summarized every topic for modern warfare but it defiantly was not “the war to end all wars’ it was very much the beginning of an era.

I guess I would like to end my thoughts in a few ways. First, I would like to thank the scientists who developed this. Even though it is a terrible force good has come out of it, with nuclear power to start with, and I hope they had the best intentions for it’s creation. Second, my prays go out to the 70,000 people who were killed instantly in the blast and the many many more who died because of it and the lives of people who were affected. As an American I feel some responsibility for people who died on either side for the defense of my freedom. Even though I do not condemn the decision that was made to use this technology I am sorry it had to come down to such a decision. Maybe someday we will not have to have such devices. Last, my respect and support for the people who have to make this and other decisions like this. Our administrators and soldiers have a huge burden to carry for protecting out country. I am sure the moral burden weighs heavy on them. I am thankful for everyone who has defended my freedom in the past and pray for their safety and good judgment in the future. Hopefully a decision like the one made on August 6th, 1945 never has to be made again.

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/the-day-war-changed/feed/0Long nightshttp://thirdshifthero.com/long-nights/
http://thirdshifthero.com/long-nights/#respondSun, 02 Aug 2009 09:11:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=4[...]]]>Wow I never thought I would actually get tired on a midnight. I must be getting old. Lucky for me I pick up some weekday midnights soon *arm pump* which will be sweet. I would rather pick up more midnights so I don’t have to do all those afternoons.So I totally drank a bottle of Sprite tonight and it made me feel like crap. How does it do that? Usually I drink it when I am sick to feel better. Seems sort of backwards. Maybe it was so epically fizzy that it was too much. I usually dig having a Sprite because I never have it…. Man I could go for a Fresca. I dig Fresca.My spelling is terrible when I don’t edit things, like this. I switch letter all the time or just leave them out. I’m sure spelling nazi’s would hate me. My English major brother would go batshit over my grammar and spelling. Oh well. All works out for me. If you can’t figure it out then… well….. something I guess. I hope I can survive the night… So… sleepy… I’ll just do some laps around the room and I’ll be good lol.

Music:“Wykydtron” – 3 Inches of Blood

]]>http://thirdshifthero.com/long-nights/feed/0Somewhat funnyhttp://thirdshifthero.com/somewhat-funny/
http://thirdshifthero.com/somewhat-funny/#respondTue, 28 Jul 2009 23:40:00 +0000http://fridgewire.com/wordpress/?p=3[...]]]>So, threw together a blog for rambling when I’m working midnights. My mind tends to wander and I enjoy putting stuff on paper… well not really paper I guess, but you get what I mean. Sort of like bloggy paper. I’ll go with that.

Now to the somewhat funny thing. So, I made this to type when I was working midnights, and if you look at the time stamp you will notice it is not very late. My first entry is actually done on an afternoon. I can live with that I guess. I suppose I could go do actual work, but that would kinda suck. I think I will just sit here eating clam chowder and reading Dune until someone forces me to get off my ass. I have a ton left in Dune, about 2/3 left. Everyone says it’s the greatest thing since anything, but I dunno. It’s good so far, I would probably even say great, but I don’t know about iconic. Well, I guess it is that too. Maybe I would place it somewhere between good and great. But, according to Tim yesterday I hate stuff just for the sake of hating it and I can’t ever be open minded. Oh well, I suppose I’ll read some more.